With the sun shining out here as Beijing springs into warmer weather, we thought it appropriate to feature our lovely Chiara for this week’s CSOFT Story. With her ebullient personality and beaming smile brightening up the CSOFT office, Italian native Chiara Conte has much to say regarding the future of translation, personal growth, and keeping a sunny disposition as the pressure begins to mount. Read on for more!

Guest blog entry by Uwe Muegge, Chief Terminologist and Co-Director of MedL10N at CSOFT

In my opinion, one key characteristic of a mature industry is the availability of a comprehensive set of established best practices, typically in the form of national or international standards.

Since its beginning in 1898, the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) has been a leading provider of standards in a wide array of industries. ASTM’s standards development process is founded on a full-consensus system that invites discussion, collaboration, and a commitment to quality; members from around the world collectively develop and maintain standards in their respective areas of expertise.

Last year, ASTM formed the ASTM Committee F43 to focus on standards specific to language services and products. The current 39 members of the committee will work together to support existing standards for interpretation, translation, language instruction and language proficiency as needed. This also includes modifying performance standards to better adapt to health care and court environments, and focusing on the cultural and language needs of employees in foreign countries. At the same time, the committee also intends to develop standards for language training, foreign language proficiency among students, and performance testing.

Happy International Translation Day! In celebration of this annual event, we want to honor and highlight the accomplishments of Chiara Conte (pictured on the right), the Chief Italian Linguist here at CSOFT. In this featured interview, Melissa Taing (left) enjoys a lively chat with Chiara, who lights up with passion about the challenges and rewards of her work, and expounds on the difference between good translators and great translators.

Chiara Conte grew up in Otranto, a remote seaside village in southern Italy with a population of just over 5,000 people. Chiara brings with her nine years of translation experience, having first obtained a bachelor’s degree in Translation and Interpretation at the University of Lecce, later having received two master’s degrees: one in Asian Languages for International Cooperation from the University of Cà Foscari in Venice, and the other as a Linguistic Expert for International Enterprises from the University of Salento.

In her free time, Chiara is an avid reader and self-professed lover of pizza in all its forms. She’s got a feisty wit and is quick to laugh—both at herself and at others. She was an absolute delight to interview, so I hope you all enjoy.

Welcome back to the fourth and final entry of Translation Review Week. So far we’ve talked about the what’s, the how’s, and the who’s of translation review. Today’s topic is tools and technology, with a focus on how the various gizmos and documents at your disposal can help secure the successful execution of your translation review cycle.

First, we would like to talk about the various reference documents that you should provide to your translators and reviewers in order to guarantee their common alignment with your organization’s products, branding, messaging, and overall communication style.

At a minimum, you should work with your language service provider to prepare the following documents/knowledge base material that will go a long way toward establishing an effective, stress-free translation review process:

• Language-specific translation style guides
• Approved multilingual glossaries
• Source documents
• Approved Translation Memory
• Relevant product knowledge/specifications
• Relevant target market/audience information

Welcome back to part three of Translation Review Week! So far we’ve talked about knowing what you want and getting what you want—two integral steps in ensuring the success of your translation review process.

From these discussions, we’ve gleaned that working with your language service provider to set specific parameters for reviewers based on your own understanding of your organization’s documents and their respective functions is the best way to facilitate an efficacious, stress-free translation review cycle. In addition, we’ve established that respecting the review process as an imperative quality assurance measure (by giving your reviewers sufficient time to work and getting them involved in a project early on) will also help to abate review-induced grey hair syndrome.

So we’ve talked about what’s and we’ve talked about how’s. Today’s topic is whom you should employ to perform translation review—getting the right people on board. We call it “The Who” of Translation Review.

(Thanks to Jim Summaria and Wikimedia Commons for this rad picture of the Who.)

It’s day two of Translation Review Week, where we plan to devote the next few days to talking about translation review and its documented correlation with migraines and road rage in the localization industry.  Get ready to talk geek, folks, ‘cause today’s entry is a good one.

Now, for those of you who just stopped by, the first entry in Translation Review Week dealt with knowing what you want. That is, it’s important to understand the types of documents you’re dealing with before translation and—more importantly—the purpose behind translating them. This information should in turn be used to inform your own requirements for translation review and overall linguistic QA. Based on what you understand of your own business and its translation objectives, you then need to interface with your language service provider and make sure that their review practices can assimilate your needs.

So yesterday, the emphasis was on identifying what you want. Today we’re going to talk about getting what you want by defining it for others. To wit, we’re going to talk about the kind of guidelines you should consider when defining the scope of, preparing for, and implementing your translation review process.

In keeping with our “tell your LSP to shut up and listen” philosophy (in business-ese, that’s “fostering a listening culture with your localization vendor”—but a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose), the following suggestions are best practices that we’ve gleaned from our experience as a leading language service provider, and by no means should they be taken as truisms that trump your internal processes and needs. They can, however, be used to complement the translation review requirements that you’ve already identified for yourself, regardless of whether you employ in-house, independent, or vendor-driven methods of review.

Welcome to Translation Review Week, where we plan to spend each day (except for Wacky Word Wednesday, of course!) dissecting and analyzing review practices in the localization industry, paying special attention to why translation review makes people want to cross their eyes and scream, and what we as a community—both translation buyers and providers alike—can do to fix it.

To begin, it’s important to note that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions when it comes to translation QA. There are, however, a good many pitfalls that limit the success of the review process.

To limit your exposure to these pitfalls, it’s important for translation buyers to first identify why you’re performing reviews and, based on that information, determine what types of reviews you want, and then how and by whom they should be performed. In order to clearly understand the focus of in-house and/or third-party translation review, however, it’s necessary to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.