OK, let's continue.
Just now we talked about translation service
and translation project management.
What does the entire procedure of the
translation project include?
Many people have put forward
their own ideas about it.
We adopt a relatively
simple statement.
Please look at the picture on the screen.
It shows the entire procedure
of translation is consisted of
commissioning, planning,
groundwork, translation
and wind-up.
We will discuss these stages
respectively and
explain them based on the
common principles
in this field.
The fist stage is
commissioning,
in which
customer will offer the material that needs to be translated
or some sample for you
to evaluate.
When translators
or translation managers get these materials,
they need firstly confirm the writing style and the requirement,
the time that may consume, whether I'm capable of translating them,
and what it will cost to translate them.
For instance, translating
some difficult materials,
like some legal documents of Hongkong,
may bring huge pressure on you.
If it's the legal documents
during Hongkong's colonial period,
you will feel
much crazier.
You need to carefully appraise
whether you can finish the task
and how much time it will cost.
Considering your competence
and advantages, offer
a proper price.
It can't be too much higher
or too much lower than the normal price in the translation industry,
or say a price too low
to depreciate yourselves.
The price is
market-oriented.
Generally speaking,
translation industry
is an industry with
sufficient competition,
so the price generally
tends to go down.
However, an absolute obstacle,
like I have just said,
prevents it from going down,
which means if you have more
distinctive and competitive advantage,
the price won't go down.
When you offer the price,
you need also provide other explanations like
the translation quality that you guarantee,
the quality standard that you can reach,
when you can hand over,
the status of my work,
and so on.
For example,
the customer gives you a WORD file,
but what he wants back
is a PDF file
that has been reorganized
according the requirement of target market and
that can be offered directly
to the printing factory to print.
In this case,
you can ask for extra fee,
depending on the capability
of your translation service.
If the customer accepts your price offer
and all other description
of this project,
you need to sign a contract.
After all these, the translation service formally begins.
Speaking of this,
I'd like to share an interesting story with you.
Recently, I helped one of my students
to take a translation task.
The customer inicially asked for
translation for
a website.
He provided some samples of website,
which were about entrance examination
for studying abroad.
Translating them into Chinese
should be very easy,
so I didn't think much about it.
After all, it is recommended by a friend.
Later we discussed it
together and
found that in fact
the service they needed
was far more than what they said or they thought.
For example,
after introducing
the translation version
of the examinations
to Chinese examinees,
the target audience,
will they accept this way of writing,
the way of presenting this website,
the content translators have produced?
Does the web itself,
including the structure,
match with the demand of Chinese exminees?
Although they have their competitive advantage,
they are not sure
if it conforms
to the way of Chinese thinking.
First, they thought that
let translators translate it,
then we could adjust.
After communication,
it was my student who finally helped them
finish all of these work,
apart from translating.
In another word, what he did
was far more than a simple
conformation of text.
After this story,
we will move on to the second stage of the translation project,
project planning.
In this stage,
the most
important thing
is to confirm the customer's requirements.
Whether it's in the situation of the story I've just told you,
or in a normal case,
the confirmation is important.
Leaving all the extra things behind,
when we are to translate
the website of studying abroad,
the things are
it is an examination
to enter universities abroad,
so should all the text
be transformed to Chinese?
And after the transformation,
especially some of the terms related to the examination,
will the examinees
understand the texts?
Will it be helpful or confusing
for the examinees?
I think you can understand.
So when the customer asks you
to translate this website,
it doesn't mean you
have translate all the words
on the page into Chinese,
word by word.
You should comprehend what is
the customer's ultimate demand,
rather than doing what
the customer asks you to.
The high-quality translation service
represents in various ways.
After a comprehensive understanding
of your customer's demand,
it is time to divide the work.
How to divide it?
It seems easy:
who should translate the first chapter,
who the second,
and who the third;
easy, isn't it?
Also, it is difficult.
There are many factors concerned.
For example, the contents of the website
may be different.
Each field has its own features.
Website translation is like this,
and engineering translation that.
When distributing the work to a translator
or a subcontractor,
we should consider the translator or subcontractor themselves,
their interests and advantages,
the amount of translation work they already have,
and their current
standard of
translation quality.
About this,
sometimes it is quite interesting.
The quality of some translators'
work is unstable,sometimes high,sometimes low,changing periodically.
This kind of translators are
not preferred by the manager of translation company,
translation project manager or the boss of the company,
because their translation quality
fluctuates too much.
The unstability in mood will
lead to the difference in the result of the translation project.
However, some of these translators
have their special competitive advantages,
as he is an expert in some field,
or when he gets a great mood for work,
he will do an excellent job
that no one else can.
So at last they continue to cooperate
with each other.
But it requires the project manager
to have a special supervision over these people
to make a stable and continuous improvement
of the entire translation project.
Next work is to confirm
the translation progress and translation schedule
to make a translation plan based on
the division and distribution of the work.
In this work, I need to remind you that
they are correlated with each other,
such as the construction of term database.
In the last lessons,
we have learned terms and term software.
You all know the importance of terms.
Before the translation work,
we must extract those terms,
translate them and sort them.
Then we have to confirm with our customers again
about the translation of those terms
to guide translation.
Therefore, all translators are waiting for
the translation result
of term experts.
Without this work begun
or finished,
all the following work couldn't be done.
Then how to improve the efficiency of the entire work?
Obviously we need to recognize
the key stage or the stage that will
have a critical influence to
other stages,
and take special control
over them.
If you are interested in the relevant theory
or the best ways for practice,
you can read
some books on
project administration,
which can also be applied to
translation project administration.
For instance,
we can use Gantt chart,
which we all like,
to plan all these projects,
to see
which part is important,
which parts are interdependent with each other,
how long each project takes.
It is apparent and clear.
When the project manager prepares
the project schedule,
he should keep in mind the document management.
Document management
is a very important stage
in translation management.
We will talk more about it
in the following lessons.
At the stage of the project schedule,
resources and budget should be managed.
When a translation task comes,
your first instinct will be
I will try my best to do this project well.
But how is the best?
Is that a reasonable choice to
ask a translator in the level of professor or director
to translate
a manual of a cellphone?
Different types of task should
be equipped with different
human resources and
different machines.
All the cooperation of resources
will bring costs.
In other word, we have to make a compromise.
The quality of translation must reach
its highest level that we can accept
within limited budget
and resources.
It will be the best if you can
exceed the lowest
acceptable base line,
but if you reach the base line
that the customers accept,
the task is considered
to have been successfully fulfilled the task.
We have mentioned the management of communication.
It also emphasises the importance
of communication management
on the left side of the flowchart,
drawed by former scholars.
Before the project starts,
the method of communication management should be determined.
Who are the people
that need
communication?
How does this communication go on?
How to confine it?
How to track
this communication for auditing?
These are the things that should
be planned at the beginning of the work.
Quality control is the vitality
of a project.
Without a good quality control,
the entire translation project
can't move forward.
The last stage should be
risk management.
About the study of risk management
in scientific translation or
engineering translation project,
my student have written a
master's thesis,
discussing the issue of
risk management in scientific project
and engineering project.
The third stage of translation project will
certainly be translating.
We will make some preparation
before the actual work.
Well, as for the actual work,
I'm saying,
the translation
and proofreading, which is
the most standard and recognized by the public.
We have to do those things
in the circle
to support proofreading.
Of course, we will not do all these in all projects,
but most of the projects.
For example, we need to choose
the software for translation and localization.
Different projects will need different
software to translate.
It is not the most advanced software
but the most suitable one
that is best for the projects.
Every project has its own features
and the cognitive load is
also not the same,
so the selection of softwares are very important.
We have just mentioned so many
affairs in management.
Is that possible to solve these problems
without using software,
but only with a paper,
the so-called leaflet?
Some companies used paper in earlier period.
Now many companies gradually
put their monitoring process
inside the software on the Internet,
coorporating with the paper
leaflets to work together.
How to balance the work model
of pure network and traditional
paper work has become the criterion
to evaluate the senior administrator
and project manager
in a translation company.
I think you are very clear about
the construction of term,
the importance of term
and the fundamental position of term list,
so we won't talk about them.
Apart from terms,
there are
translation memory database in many projects.
The time when we explain
the translation memory
is a little long from today's course,
but I think you haven't forgot it yet.
Translation memory is quite
important to improve the uniformity of the entire translation,
and finally to improve
the quality of translation.
Customers may provide us with some documents
which can be transformed
into a translation memory database.
Also, sometimes we need to
make some special disposition according
to customer's requests.
Do you still remember the alignment in mass quantity?
There are two articles,
how to align two sentences in WinAlign
or in the website of
aligner.pkucat.com.
After the alignment,
we can put them in the selected
software of translation
and localization as
translation memory database
for future use.
In some large-scale translation company,
when we have to face a
huge quantity of translation task,
we will encounter the problem of
the machine translation,
that's Google translation.
Although it has a high quality of translation,
it targets at a general translation task.
It tries to settle all translation work
with a roughly
reasonable answer.
So it will be very hard on
a given field.
For example,
some words may have obscure meanings
or different meanings
and we have to make a reasonable choice.
But on a specific field,
Some words, phrases,
even sentences may
have fixed translation.
Then we give all this material to a machine to translate.
It can be trained to be a translation system
in a given field.
Even if it doesn't have
a great engine
as Google,
the quality in this field
will be much better
than Google.
This has been proved
for many times.
Some domestic institute or organization
which works on the study of machine translation
is providing
the so-called machine translation service
in a given field.
We will continue to discuss it
in future lessons.
OK, now we have finished
all the preparation,
so we can begin to
translate the text.
Certainly, you need to prepare
all the text
that needs translation.
In the technology lecture,
we have mentioned OCR,
optical character recognition,
and other methods of
inputting characters and text formats.
All these discussions about technological methods
will be covered here.
In conclusion,
it will involve a lot of things
in face of the real translation task
or a large-scale
translation work.
The existence of this course,
to some extent, is related
with the complexity
of translation work.
In the last stage,
we have successfully translated the task,
and are ready to submit our translated
work to our customer
and get paid.
In this stage, we need to
pay attention to the deadline,
format, and the customer's requests.
Apart from handing over the work,
our customer may ask for some
files that we get in the process of translation
with the help of computer-assisted translation tools,
such as term database, term chart,
translation memory database,
working dairy,
and the communication record
with customers,
as a part of translation
service.
Our customer may save these in archives
or prepare them as knowledge reserve
for the next
translation service.
It is nature for translation company
to give those information to customers.
Some translation company
will accumulate those information
for themselves
as a back-up after sending them
to the customer.
All these language resources
will be used as translation memory terms
to train the translation machine
and direct other translators
to assist us fulfil other
translation tasks,
which is good.
But sometimes,
it is confined by the so-called secrecy agreement.
In many project,the secrecy agreement
are very strict, for example,
after the translation task ends,
translation service provider
can't keep translated work
no matter in paper or electronic file
or other ways.
When encountering this kind of customers,
we should observe
the agreement in the contract of translation service.
It's a matter of course.
When it comes to financial affairs,
including asking for payment,
having receipts after
service is provided,
If disagreement occurs,
things like arbitration,
or negotiation,
or lawsuit,
are beyond the extent of our course.
We will stop here.