Our client is one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies who wanted its internal code of conduct documents translated into Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indonesian and Thai. The extensive documentation contained much industry and client-specific terminology which required accurate and thoroughly consistent translations.
As well as requiring consistency within each language version, our client contact needed to control the use of acronyms and English wording for specific terms across all language versions.
The main challenge to this project was the terminology – both the terminology specific to the oil and gas industry as well as the terms commonly used by our client in its internal communications. We also needed to make it easy for our client contact, who speaks only English, to control which terms were to be left in English.
After Asian Absolute first created a glossary of English terms which was submitted to our client contact so she could identify the terms and acronyms that were to be left in English.
We then translated the remaining glossary terms into each of the target languages, and included the English terms and acronyms that we had been instructed not to translate. Each glossary was reviewed by an in-country manager on the client side, who approved the proposed translations and had the opportunity to comment on our client contact’s decisions about the use of certain English terms.
Armed with the approved glossaries, our translators proceeded with the translation of the documentation, referring to the glossary and using the relevant terms where appropriate.
In order to guarantee consistency of terminology throughout the documents and to facilitate the translation process, the translators used Trados Translation Memory and Terminology software. As the translators worked their way through the documents, these Computer Aided Translation (CAT) tools recognized words that appeared in the glossary and proposed the approved terms as probable translations.
The careful approach of creating a glossary and using CAT tools was instrumental in meeting the client’s requirements and optimizing the efficiency of the workflow. Our client contact knew that her instructions were applied to all languages without needing to check any of them herself, and the in-country managers were delighted to receive well-written, accurate translations containing the exact terms they would have used if they had written the documents themselves.
