While your main focus for translation services may be on your core product, it is key not to overlook IT document translation. Before hiring a translation services company to provide your technical translation, it is vitally important to include your user interface files as part of your project early on to allow enough time for a quality translation.
While poorly translated IT document translation may seem comical to some, it can be a source of frustration for users who depend on easily understanding or troubleshooting a device. Without the right IT document translation, your brand image may suffer and users can even suffer physical harm because information on their peripheral device interface is inaccurate.
Let’s look at two considerations in effective IT document translation.
IT Document Translation Should Be Clear and Accurate for End Users
When a peripheral interface is confusing or unclear to an end user, it can cause negative consequences that go beyond retranslating IT documentation. Aside from the negative image and customer dissatisfaction, mishandling of a device or following the wrong instructions on a screen can lead to serious harm and unforeseen litigation for your company.
As IT document translation is a unique and specialized field in and of itself, the importance of accurate translation cannot be overstated. For your business, an error in IT document translation can result in missed deadlines, loss of credibility, customer and sales loss, conflict with foreign partners, and time and productivity wasted.
A professional translation services company can effectively adapt differences where the target market uses a different language, the language is character-based, or it uses a different directional flow in text.
At ILS, our production team is experienced in formatting multilingual documents of any size and complexity. We ensure your document is properly translated in specific and popular formats such as XML, PHP, RESX, and ASP, which are commonly found in user interfaces of consumer-facing devices.
IT Document Translation Requires Special Formatting to Account for Different Languages
Translated content is rarely ever the same length as the original document. Languages such as German, for example, result in much longer sentences than English. Conversely, other languages may use fewer words to identify the same thing.
This is especially important to consider in IT document translation, where hyphenation rules, space constraints, and other issues require specific handling to correctly format on a glucose monitor or radiation detector, for example. Special attention must be paid to consistency between a monitor interface and user manual, to ensure they make perfect sense to the user and avoid confusion.
All of these issues are language-sensitive, and only a top-quality language services company can effectively and skillfully translate and format your IT document translation.
At ILS, we handle your translation from beginning to end—our professional linguists and subject matter experts fully understand your language and are equipped to work on your IT documentation translation. We take your original source document and efficiently deliver a completed project that is ready for printed or electronic display.
