Corporate style & linguistic assets

Corporate style

Skilled and experienced though your translators may be, don’t let them guess how you want to communicate with your target audience. Obviously, there are rules towards correct use of language, but when it comes to style, many valid options are available that may alter the user experience quite drastically. Do you address readers in a formal or informal way, what level of politeness should you apply, use passive/active voice, how to convert currency and format dates, etc.: these are decisions you would have to take upfront. Involve the internal reviewers in this process: they will have to make sure the rules have been followed consequently. An efficient validation strategy is the next step.

Terminology management

The use of correct terminology is one of the most important conditions to generate high-quality translations. Setting up an infrastructure that allows you to manage your unique terms effectively and share them with all stakeholders should be ranked high on your “To Do list”.

In order to collect, manage, and share corporate terminology, you need an infrastructure that supports industry standards. Its configuration is absolutely key for an efficient deployment (Keep It Simple!). Transparent maintenance procedures including a strategy for new term harvesting and validation, lead to accurate and consistent terminology usage in all content types.

Validation

The biggest hurdle in translation projects is often the internal validation phase. Projects grind to a sudden halt when the assigned subject matter experts have to fit in validation into their busy schedules. However, it is absolutely necessary that an internal resource approves the content of a message meant for external use: it wouldn’t be the first time that a company suffers from reputation damage because of hilarious translations, or loses money because the pricing was not correct in the sales document. There are ways to smoothen the internal validation process: the most obvious one is to produce better translations, so that specialists don’t have to worry about punctuation and spelling mistakes. But implementing an efficient validation process, supported by an infrastructure and clear guidelines will also help reviewers to work faster, with no more loops and better final output.