White Paper: Localizing User Assistance Content: 15 Essential Tips for 'Help' Translation (cont.)

Communication and Planning

You’ve identified the content to be translated, the language(s) you want and have selected a translation partner. A well thought-out plan, developed at the outset of your project, can save a great deal of time and money. When developing your plan, keep these things in mind:

1. Notify your translation partner as soon as you know that you are doing a project. Early information about the project helps the team plan and enables them to provide you with accurate estimates, resources and schedules. If the schedule changes or there are major/minor feature changes, keep the team informed so they can effectively adapt.
2. Plan your schedule with translation in mind. Because translation is typically the last phase before product release, surprises and schedule slips that affect the source product will affect the release schedule of the translated versions. As for how much time to allot, you should provide your translation partner with as much information about the project volumes beforehand so they can offer a time frame. As an example, if you have a 300-page document to be translated into 10 languages, your project schedule should reflect six-to-eight weeks for translation and associated activities.
3. Invite both teams to the project kick-off meeting. The attendance of key team members from both your content authoring teams and your translation partner is critical. This fosters an ongoing dialog and helps to set clear expectations. Provide contact information for the leads in each functional area and agree on a maximum response time for queries and exchange of information. Ensuring quick, accurate responses to questions reduces potential re-work, helps the project stay on schedule, and ensures that quality expectations will be met.
4. Institute an effective change management process. Changes happen. The key to successful translation projects is to evaluate each change for severity to ensure that it really needs to be made at that stage in the product cycle, and batching necessary changes together. Sending individual or last minute changes adds significantly to the translation cost, especially during the desktop publishing (DTP) stage, since the section being updated must be sent back through the entire process. For example, a relatively minor cosmetic change that would take three hours to make in the English version of the documentation, would be exponentially more time consuming when made in six languages. In this case, it might be advisable to wait until the next release cycle.
5. Have a dedicated linguistic reviewer for each language. Linguistic reviewers are vital to ensuring that the translated documentation meets your market requirements. While translators will be experienced in your industry, your employees and representatives have the product knowledge and understanding of company-specific preferences and terminology. For best results, your reviewer and your translation service provider’s senior linguist will be in regular communication from project kick-off to completion.
   1. Who makes the best reviewer? Look for subject matter experts who also have the language skills to review translation quality. Since an effective linguistic review takes time, performing translation reviews should be part of their regular responsibilities.

Conclusion

Applying these steps and working with a talented translation provider will keep your user assistance translation project on time and on budget. Your end-users with thank you — and so will your translation team.

Contact us to learn more about localizing your next project.

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