The end client is a giant American multinational specialised in software and hardware development. It is responsible for the production and marketing of several lines of innovative products and is an impressive sales phenomenon. The SMARTIDIOM team’s collaboration with this client began in September 2012, with the opportunity to work on an ambitious new project, where we estimated a volume of 150,000 to 200,000 words for translation and revision in the space of a month and a half. The team’s excellent performance on this project ensured the success of this experience and also contributed to SMARTIDIOM continuing, even today, to be one of the preferred suppliers for this important international client.
SMARTIDIOM saw the exponential growth of its work volume at the end of 2014, a fact that also allowed the considerable increase in the number of its in-house employees. Due to this increase in internal specialised human resources, SMARTIDIOM began to encounter a new challenge, due to the inevitable growth of the company: to ensure the terminology consistency of one of its most important clients. Although the client provided online access to translation memories and terminology databases, these would sometimes include fairly old and outdated entries that had to do with discontinued products. On the other hand, there were small differences between the various translation memories, which made the maintenance of the sought-after consistency quite difficult.
The first step consisted in the creation of a glossary that included such elementary preciosities as the kind of quotation marks to use, which situations require upper case or lower case letters and a few common terms with regard to the client’s software and hardware. Over time, the glossary came to include the preferred terms of the client’s reviewer whenever we receive new feedback, essential to the constant improvement of the quality of work delivered. At a later stage, we decided to dedicate some time to creating a broader terminology database that would include the terms of the client’s terminology as well as those that were mostly used by the reviewer. Later on, it was possible to create an offline terminology database that could be added to the project even during the translation, thus facilitating the search for terms, since the term in the glossary appears highlighted in the file to be translated. When the monthly meetings with the client’s reviewer began, it became easier to report inconsistencies in the translation memories and terminology databases, thus contributing impressively to the improvement of the results of these translation memories for the client.
With the creation of the glossary and its integration in the translation software, the number of inconsistencies found in the different files decreased considerably. The constant update of these files ensured the accurate use of these terms by the team of translators and reviewers. Additionally, the final analysis on the quality check program, with the glossary, helped ensure that the terms had been correctly translated. The simplicity of this tool allowed new terms to be added to the list whenever new terminology arose or rapidly create a new glossary with terms from a given project.
Founded in 2012, SMARTIDIOM offers innovative multilingual services, helping global organisations and brands to grow and achieve international success. Our solutions include technical translation, technical writing, website and software localisation, software and hardware testing, copywriting, transcreation (creative translation for marketing and advertising), subtitling, interpreting, narration and audio/video transcription. Actively present in 25 countries, SMARTIDIOM partners with clients from a wide variety of industries, including Marketing and Advertising, IT and Software, Telecommunications, Construction, Energy and the Environment.