15: Discussing the Power of Translation- with Trish Stuart

Meet Trish:After teaching middle school for almost a decade, Trish found the translation and localization industry over a summer hiatus. Thinking it would be just a temporary job, now 22 years later, she is the US director for Terralingua Translations. Who translates content into over 100 different languages for manufacturers and exporters worldwide. Kris: What is the most important thing that you think they should know when they're going for translation services?Trish: Well, whenever you're interviewing there are many different ways to do it. So if you decide that you want to enter into a partnership with a translation provider, there are all these great acronyms out there. So you decide to go into a partnership with someone, the most important thing for you to know, and it's sort of like a dating question, right? I would liken it to if you'd be interviewing a photographer, you would say, Do I have ownership of the digital images, right? At that part of the asset, this is what is similar to something called translation memory. So whenever you enter into a partnership, or you invest in translation, my qualifying question would be for anyone would be, do I have ownership of the translation memory? Because if you don't have ownership of the translation memory, whenever you invest in professional translation, you won't be able to repurpose or is going back to digital photography, right? What do we do? So professional translation providers use a tool, it's a CAT tool or a computer-aided translation tool. Now, it is not machine translation. And that's something else important to know, whenever you're comparing apples to apples, you want to make sure, are these humans? Or is it machine translation cleaned up by a human? That's another question you can ask. But what it is, is it's a tool. And I liken it to like a little suitcase. So you say, Okay, I want to take this suitcase to Mexico, right? So they're going to take all of your English content, and one suitcase will open up another suitcase that's packed from Mexico. And they're going to make segments that match all of those. You know, they're called segments, but all of the content, they're going to say, Okay, we have this term here, we're going to match it with this term here. And then they unpack it and put it into a layout. If it's if it's needed. It may not be it may just be text. But what happens then is that these two little suitcases are there, and they're aligned. And you can take that Spanish suitcase, and you could repurpose it later on. Lori: What if I've already engaged a language service provider? And I didn't know about this translation memory, what would you recommend? Trish: If you left because of the quality, it's best to leave it behind and start new. So you can gain any of it from a previous provider, we can reuse and repurpose it, we can even check it for you anyone can check it and say, Well, you know, the quality doesn't seem to be so great. Or we can merge. So let's say you didn't know, we've already started one for you. And you say, oh, shoot, I didn't know that we have this already existing one, you can merge your translation memories. And your LSP or language service provider can resolve any conflicts for you and ask. And they can pull out the key terminology. And they can say, here's what we have. We have this in English, and this in French, what terms do you want us to keep? And which ones do you want us to throw out? So it's helpful no matter what stage you're at; if you're able to get it, it's useful information. If it was from a quality provider, you don't just want to leave it in the dustbin. But we can recreate a translation memory, in a sense, where we can align, let's say you have a translated manual, and you know, the matching English, we can create. But oftentimes the...