With the emergence of new ways of creating and publishing any kind of content, translation and localisation project management processes must be adapted in order to meet the needs of clients. This blog post will shed a light on how your contents and documents will be handled during the translation process.
There is a great variety not only in the types of content but also in the ways how they are created and in the systems they are managed in. Content types can include company internal documents like policies or reports, product related documents, e.g. instructions for use or any kind of help materials, marketing related documents, etc. The place of publication also impacts how each piece of information is created and in what tool, because different software might be used for handbooks, brochures or online materials. The media itself and how the content is transferred to end users has an effect on how they should be handled during the translation process, so other approaches are needed for text-based content, figures, flowcharts or audio-visual materials where subtitling and dubbing are in focus.
Creating content can have different levels of complexity from using simple word processing software to deploying content management systems which have many more features. These influence the file types that contain the translatable content, whether they are PDFs, Word, Excel or PowerPoint files or complex XML or HTML files.
Regardless of how the content is created and in what system, the first step in the translation management process is to extract the translatable content, because this will be the basis for determining the budget and time frame of the project. We have developed file preparation processes for every scenario. Our project managers will assess the files with the client in order to determine which part of the text should be translated and what shouldn’t be (e.g. codes, variables, mark-up tags etc.). The non-translatable content will be protected from unintentional editing during the whole translation process, so the client can import back to their content management system seamlessly or prepare the target language text for publishing.
Depending on the system or software used, it can be easier or more challenging to extract the translatable texts. In any cases, the main goal is to send back the translated content in the format that it was received in. To achieve that, we rely on our project managers, DTP experts and language engineers who help to extract, protect the untranslatable parts, implement the translated content and check it before publication if needed.
Want to find out more? Contact our language experts today!