How can you improve technical translation quality through revision?

I often use the reverse translation technique. After translating a document, I translate it back into the original language. It's a bit like retracing my steps. It might sound redundant, but it’s a great way to catch nuances or errors that I might have missed.

In my experience, improving technical translation quality through revision involves several key types of revisions. ??Firstly, linguistic revision ensures accuracy, clarity, and coherence in the target language, addressing grammatical errors and lexical choices. ??Secondly, subject matter experts conduct content revision, verifying the technical accuracy and appropriateness of terminology within the specific field. Additionally, style revision focuses on consistency and adherence to the client's guidelines, ensuring the translation aligns with the intended audience and purpose. ??Finally, a final review consolidates all revisions, ensuring a seamless and polished end product that meets the highest standards of quality and precision.

Revision criteria are pivotal in elevating translation quality. Accuracy ensures fidelity to the source, preserving intended meaning. Clarity eradicates ambiguity, enhancing understanding. Coherence and cohesion maintain structural consistency and logical flow. Terminology precision, tailored to the audience, ensures relevance. Adhering to the source text's style guarantees stylistic harmony, while format adaptation upholds visual integrity. These criteria, when meticulously followed, heighten translations, embodying precision, clarity, and fidelity.

Basically, revision criteria typically include checking for accuracy, coherence, consistency, and adherence to style guidelines. This involves verifying grammar, terminology, technical accuracy, and overall readability to ensure the translated text meets the client's requirements and effectively communicates the intended message to the target audience. ????????

I think back translation is a fundamental component of quality assurance in the translation industry, especially in medical and pharmaceutical fields as precision is crucial to ensure patient safety and understanding, by comparing the back-translated text with the source text, discrepancies or inaccuracies can be detected, allowing for necessary revisions and improvements. Linguistic discrepancies can be rectified by identifying any deviations from the original text, resulting in a more precise representation of the source text. Back translation also allows localization professionals to ensure that the translated content retains the intended message, cultural sensitivity, and local relevance. Furthermore, it is a validating research tool.

??? Linguistic revision: Checking for grammar, syntax, and clarity. ??? Content revision: Verifying technical accuracy and appropriateness of terminology. ??? Style revision: Ensuring consistency, coherence, and adherence to style guidelines.

Revision serves as a linchpin in enhancing technical translation quality. It allows for meticulous scrutiny of terminology, style, and accuracy. Firstly, it ensures alignment with the source material, validating technical accuracy and terminology coherence. Additionally, revision fosters linguistic refinement, ironing out any ambiguities or inconsistencies. Furthermore, it offers a fresh perspective, enabling the identification and rectification of errors or omissions. Ultimately, through systematic revision, technical translation quality ascends, bolstering precision, clarity, and fidelity to the original content.

After following the revision steps explained in this article taking into cognisance accuracy, fluency, terminology, style and design, a quality assurance check using a CAT tool is also important. Give it a human touch if needed. One crucial aspect overlooked is the influence of cultural nuances, which is essential for accurate and effective communication across different cultures. The way language units are used and understood is influenced by cultural specifics. Therefore, the translators render into another language what the words in the original message means in their cultures, thus cultural gap is filled up while revising so that intended meaning is preserved and relevance assured to suit the target audience and purpose.

Technical translation is a search-based field. Being updated with latest technologies, trends and digital transformations is a must. Don't rest assured to what is already known and well-spread. You have to search, think, compare and conclude the actual meaning of a term. Clear,concise and simple are the keys to brilliant technical translation.

La révision est le socle de toute traduction technique, car elle permet de peaufiner un texte dans son format final. Avec la révision, on peut repérer les fautes d'orthographe et de ponctuation, ainsi que la sous-traduction, la sur-traduction, les non-sens et les phrases sans-sens. La révision est une étape à ne surtout pas oublier, car elle permet d'avoir un regard attentif global sur l'entièreté de votre travail pour le rendre agréable à l'?il.