What are the best techniques for maintaining translation consistency in multiple projects?

A translator should familiarize himself with the text before diving in (you can call me old fashioned) and in doing so it could be helpful to appreciate the interrelationship between the different projects / documents to reckon whether one has sprung out of a former document(s) and see whether some parts need to be straight-lifted from former documents to maintain the integrity of the BoK of the organization/publication/company and use these are a guidance for subsequent translations. Call it a brain warm-up session, a let us gather all the tools we can

Industry- or field-specific glossaries are good for familiarizing oneself with the content and finding accurate terminology. However, building a client-specific glossary is the way to go to maintain consistency if you are continuously working with them. Note: When working for multiple clients from the same industry, I like to keep term bases and bilingual repositories separate for each of them. Clients in the same industry may speak the same 'language,' but their brand voices and styles are key differentiators. Even when translating technical documents like RFPs or manuals, be mindful of the client's idiosyncrasies and preferences.

A simple glossary in Word or Excel is a rather quaint way to go about it. Go further - have a specialist termbase for your terminology - and set up RegExes for QA in your CAT tool to handle all sorts of issues, such as acronyms (e.g. to spot where MiFID appears as MIFID), issues with spacing between numbers and units etc (e.g. say to check that Mrd. in German is rendered as bn in English). The time saving, especially if rolled out to a large team can really be considerable.

Working on multiple projects at the same time sounds like a tough thing to achieve, but its not impossible, working on different games and updates at the same time is actually quiet fun, here is how we do it: 1. Create Style Guides and Glossaries 2. Centralized translation management system 3. Consistent Team of Translators 4. Quality Assurance 5. Translation Memories

Ensuring consistent translations across projects for a single client is paramount. CAT tools are advantageous, enhancing consistency not just for technical writing, but creative copy as well. Leveraging translation memories (bilingual segment repositories) and term bases (thesaurus, glossaries) streamlines efforts, but effective management is vital. Expertise of a dedicated translation project manager and reviewer is pivotal for maintaining consistency, especially when scaling up to tackle high volume with a team of translators working on various assets for the same client. Quality assurance features in CAT tools further assist translators and reviewers in upholding style and terminology coherence.

Having a file consisting of translation templates assists a lot of the project, even when we deal with multiple translation projects. The templates can be obtained from the translation memory we already have in our files. E.g. forms, identity documents, agreements, certificates, deeds, etc.

A solid set of RegEx that are checked in the QA process can also be incredibly useful. I recently saw a demonstration about how this is handled in Trados - the presenter pointed out that this is a very good way to reduce the cognitive overload on translators working to tight deadlines, provided the RegExes don't return too many false positives.

Just make sure you apply careful due diligence before assigning the translator/editor roles. Many agencies I've worked for assign their top talent as editors, so their feedback bears more weight. If you mis-assign those roles, you're creating room for unnecessary and time-consuming back and forths between them.

Time constraints means it's not always possible to have a live peer-review session, but it's really helpful in unifying not only the text but also the team. In my experience, fostering that kind of open and respectful line of communication means you're going to have a more efficient team down the road with future projects.

Taking time to ensure that translation data (i.e. TU metadata like job names, domains, customers, subject keywords, ...) is added to your TMs can prove exceptionally helpful. Language variants should also be kept separate i.e. separate TMs for DE-EN(GB) and DE-EN(US).

Here’s something simple, even laughable, but a needed skill: learn to read thoroughly and carefully. What’s the use of creating a glossary or translation memory if you won’t spend the time looking closely at words formerly used or approaches formerly utilized when doing current translation work? I know this already falls under the category of proper work ethic but believe me, there’s a huge effort needed to focus on this very basic task. Translators who won’t even try to study or analyze available resources are just plain lazy. I wonder how they plan to thrive and survive in an industry focused on reading! Sadly, I regularly encounter such so-called professionals. I sincerely hope they improve — for their own sake and their clients’.

I usually ask for glossaries from my clients if they have one, if not, then I use my own glossary. A part from peer reviews, I made effort to have a kind of caucus of translators in my own field so that we have a unified glossary among us so that we will be consistent in translating new terms in my target language (Hausa).

In addition to what has been written already: Centralized Translation Management System (TMS): Use a TMS to manage all translation projects. It allows for centralized storage of all translations, glossaries, and TMs. It also facilitates collaboration among translators, reviewers, and project managers.

Often, translation agencies employ a range of Translation Management System (TMS) tools, leading to the translation memories and glossaries scattered across multiple cloud-based platforms. This fragmentation can result in inconsistencies in translation memories, glossaries, and style guides. Therefore, a crucial best practice is to centralise all linguistic assets into a single repository. Secondly, often, we see clients who work with multiple translation agencies (often choosing each project based on the cheapest quote). This is one sure-fire way to end up with inconsistencies in your translations and unfortunately this is a significant issue in the translation industry in Australia, particularly the public sector.