Document Translation

Our translators and reviewers are expected to have intimate knowledge of industry terms, technical parlance, text abbreviations and symbols. Only if you know what for and how exactly a biochemical analyser is used, can you translate its manual like a pro.

For over ten years, Profpereklad has successfully translated documents for the following fields and subject matters:

• Life Sciences and Pharmaceuticals;
• Law; 
• Finance and Business;
• Marketing;
• Media and Journalism;
• IT and Telecommunication;
• Household and Office Equipment, Consumer Electronics;
• Industrial Equipment;
• Electrical and Electronic Engineering;
• E-Commerce & FMCG;
• Chemistry;
• Construction and Manufacturing;
• Oil & Gas;
• Metallurgy;
• Mining;
• Energy;
• Transportation, etc.

As we understand how important specialisation is, we lay considerable weight on vendor specialisations when selecting translators and reviewers for our projects.

Any business aiming to enter a foreign market will eventually need to have their content translated into target market languages. It is quite natural to have quality concerns because a translation performed by a translator with poor professional skills may affect not only the outcome of a transaction or event but also the company’s reputation in general.

Translation May be Provided by:

A Machine Translation (MT) Software

This simple, quick, and, most importantly, free-of-charge option is surely tempting. Be sure, though, to find numerous semantic issues in the translation. The MT technology is not anywhere near perfect despite the recent developments of the neural network technology. Moreover, if the source text had some printing issues, punctuation errors or ambiguities, the resulting translation may read like nonsense. Whatever the hype may be, artificial intelligence (AI) cannot yet compete with an experienced human translator, and you will have to pay for a high-quality translation product.

A Freelancer

From among professional freelance translators, some may be more skilled and experienced than others, and a few may even engage in an unscrupulous behaviour. As a client, you would rarely have time and resources to verify the freelancer’s qualifications. Besides, you may never be able to get all your questions answered before going forward with your project. You will want to know as to how sustainable your communication with the freelance vendor of your choice will be, whether the translator will adhere to your project timeframe and instructions, whether he or she will revise the translation according to the comments made, or whether you can trust the freelance translator to take on your next project, etc. Our statistics show that only one out of thirty translators who apply to work with us successfully pass our industry-specific translation tests. Some more vendors drop out during our probation periods. This demonstrates the quality of the freelance translation market.

Translation Agency

The above concerns are unavoidable if you decided to hire a freelancer vendor. However, you will have no such issues should you go with a translation company. We employ well-tried and competent in-house and freelance translators, reviewers, proofreaders, DTP specialists, and developers. Our experienced project managers (PMs) oversee project management processes and customer communication. Relying on this approach, we are able to ensure high quality not only in one project but also in any project that follows up.

Quality Standards

The international standards ISO 17100 and EN 15038 specify requirements for the translation quality standards. According to these standards, any translated document should be checked by a reviewer and a proofreader. This is the only logical and proper solution for quality assurance. However well done, the completed translation may still have semantic, grammatical, spelling and/or punctuation issues, which may not have been the translator’s fault exactly. Other than negligence or incompetence, the human factor is often to blame for such issues. Sometimes they can only be identified with fresh eyes, i.e. a proofreading by someone other than the translator.

If they remove revision by a reviewer and proofreader from the workflow steps, they can reduce the cost of the project by 30 % and offer the client a lower and more competitive price. This is a dishonest action, which contradicts the international translation standards. Unfortunately, it is a common practice in Ukraine. As our reviewers and proofreaders have reported based on their experiences, if such an unscrupulous practice is in place, the probability of finding an error in the completed translation increases ten-fold. How much could a zero omitted in your contract price or a typo made in your pharmaceutical product’s dosage actually cost you?

You can make sure the translation you have received has actually been revised by asking your translation agency to provide you with the pre-revision and post-revision versions of the translation.

This way, you will be able to clearly see the actual scope of the revision process. However, this can be seen only after the fact.

The best way to check the translation quality offered by a translation company is to request a short translation to be performed on a pilot basis and then to check the quality of the delivered translation. We recommend that you send your test sample without revealing its true purpose, so that you will be able to get back a translation of the actual quality maintained by the translation company.

At Profpereklad, our translation projects go through several stages, including revision, proofreading, and formatting. This is what sets us apart from most small translation companies, which typically simply send their projects to freelancers they find on popular job websites, without any adequate quality assurance or terminology management systems, etc.

Our standard project workflow consists of the following stages:

1. Preparation of Files with Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
   If the source file is a scanned copy, it will be converted into an editable document by the method of recognition and reproduction of formatted text (including indents, headers and footers, page numbers, automatic tables of content, and images). We will submit to the client a perfect final file with no formatting flaws.
2. Translation.
   We will assign translation to one or several (if the translation is urgent) vetted translators, specialising in the relevant domain: e.g. clinical trials to a translator with a clinical background, industrial equipment to an engineer, an agreement to a lawyer. Only through such a vendor vetting process, can we ensure the best quality.
3. Revision.
   Our industry-specific reviewer will check the accuracy and correctness of the completed translation. With our specialised software SDL GroupShare Server (not to be confused with machine translation (MT)!), we will ensure that the terms used across the project files are consistent with the project glossary and generate a termbase for any future projects of this client.
4. Proofreading.
   Our proofreader will check the translation for any spelling, grammar, and punctuation issues to ensure the translation is typo-free, and altogether flawless.
5. QA (Quality Assurance).
   With our special QA software programme Verifika, we will check the numbers for any omissions and inconsistencies (one zero omitted in your contract price may cost you dearly!), the terminology for consistency across the project files, and the whole project for any omitted or untranslated segments.
6. DTP (Desktop Publishing).
   If the source file has any information graphics, charts, diagrams, or drawings containing text, we will reproduce them in the target language to look exactly as the original document. The DTP tasks are carried out using such programmes as InDesign, AutoCAD, QuarkXPress, Illustrator, etc.
7. Final Check.
   We will carry out a final check of the post-DTP version to make sure that everything looks fine and within the frames, and that the deliverables are up to the mark.

We attach particular significance to managing our translation projects properly. Each client has their own PM assigned to them. The PM’s main function is to keep track of any of the client’s instructions and requests. We also use one of the best IT solutions for the translation industry―the translation project management system XTRF.

XTRF automates many recurrent actions, such as submission of translation files, deadline monitoring at each step, invoice issuance, etc. It helps us reduce any errors caused by the human factor, for example, when a file sent is incorrect or delayed, or when a quote submitted is miscalculated in its price or deadline, etc.

Thanks to this automation technology, we are able to cut our operating costs and invest the savings into the improvement of our quality assurance processes and customer service. Please know that, if you choose to work with us, you will not need to worry about our cutting corners to improve our margins at the expense of quality.