100% Matches – Should you review?

I totally “get” the customers who believe that having paid for a segment (sentence, paragraph or whatever) to be translated once, they shouldn’t have to repay every time it is reused in subsequent releases. I understand their frustration when, more than occasionally, the advice coming back from the translators is that stuff already translated, needs to be reviewed. A sentence is a sentence is a sentence, right? Why would it need to be looked at again?

The fact is that often, previous material does need to be reviewed. Firstly there is the obvious situations of “different context”. With English as our source we can re-use the same words and expressions in different contexts, without having to give much mind to the context. Red is always red, regardless of what is red. But in Italian, red can be rosso, or rossa, or even rossi or rosse, depending on what is being described (masculine or feminine, singular or plural). Having a match generate a grammatical error may not be a matter to be overly concerned about, but to some companies it shows a limit to the commitment to providing a local product. By all means accept that risk, as long as you’ve evaluated it.

Next we have the evolution of terminology. As quickly as technology is developing so also are the terms we use for it. If your product is in a market that is changing rapidly (mobile or cloud computing for example) the chances are that key terms agreed and locked away two years ago, may be in need of a facelift. This is especially true where localised versions go to and from using English terms for “new” technologies. A product can often look a little stale if it’s forced to comply with outdated terminology.

Finally, there’s the issue of the individual style of a translator. If a product has been translated over a number of years there can be no guarantee that the translators who worked on it originally (or since then) will be available for the next round. The result of a no review policy can be that the product can become a patchwork quilt of translations, with the local eye able to easily detect two separate segments coming from two separate times and people.

When I talk to customers who are new to translation about 100% matches coming from memories I sometimes use the analogy of painting a room. I tell them to imagine that they want a new wall painted in a colour to match the existing paintwork but you don’t want the painter to look at the existing work in order to find the right match. It’s Yellow…so Yellow will be fine. Yellow is Yellow, right just like German is German and French is French)? What can go wrong?  But the painter uses a slightly paler shade of yellow to the one that was last used, or even sometimes a different shade entirely. We therefore shouldn’t be surprised if someone who looks at the room as a whole detects the different ages and shades of colour.

The 100% match debate is about so much more than price. It’s about the quality of your legacy material and the need for your product to be refreshed (or not!).