CTC uses only experienced qualified translators whose specific skills are matched to each assignment. CTC's translators are highly professional individuals committed to their vocation. We utilise native in-country linguists as part of the overall quality assurance for localisation projects.
Translator Qualifications:
Academic – acquired both locally and overseas, CTC translators have completed academic degrees in translation and a range of other disciplines. Employment – technical translators have work experience in industry, often both locally and overseas. Accreditation – As a minimum translators must hold professional accreditation certificates from local or international organisations:
| United Kingdom: MCIL and FCIL | Ireland: ITIA |
| United States: ATA | Australia and New Zealand: NAATI |
Project Management:
Accreditation certificates may be a neccesary, but not sufficient reason, for eligibility with the CTC language teams. Further testing, project supervision, and years of experience is required before full membership is granted. CTC project managers have accumulated decades of expertise acting and are the core of the quality control for the entire translation/localisation project cycle. CTC does not outsource to call centres in order to possibly save on costs. CTC ensures that clients are provided dedicated locally based project mangers so that there is continuity and a trust based relationship built from each assignment. With its 20 years of project management CTC can count on at minimum of 30 experienced translators and 4 senior editors, in each in the top 20 commercial languages. The core language translation teams in each language have been forged through long term working relationships that have stood the test of time and the challenges of complex localisation projects.
Quality Translation Outcomes and Authoring
A quality translation aims to reproduce the meaning in a way that is accurate - the meaning must be
conveyed without error or omission so that it is easily understood by the target readership. It is therefore important that the source documentation has been written clearly and without ambiguity. Further source documentation should avoid idioms or colloquialisms will also make your copy more international in flavour. Click here for authoring tips to help you produce texts that are more suitable for translation. Professional translation should also be grammatically correct and follow the style and register of the source documentation. It is the source document author's responsibility to write for the intended reader and the translator's job to maintain the same style and tone of the original.
Translation Methods
There are two professional methods of translation:
• Traditional – manual or in electronic format. Translation 'by hand' can be recommended for literary texts and creative writing. All other translation work is done on soft copy by progressively overwriting the source text with the translation in order to ensure the layout is not affected.
The average individual daily output for a translator using the traditional method is around 2000 words, depending on the subject and degree of technicality of the text.
• Automated – Computer-Aided Translation (CAT). Ideal for software localisation and highly repetitive documents which require fast turnaround times and consistency in terminology. Not to be confused with machine translation, which attempts to translate text automatically and to date does not deliver reliable results for business use. See CAT Technologies for more information about Translation Technologies and CAT tools.
Quality Assurance
To meet the highest standards, CTC has developed extensive quality management systems to ensure that your contents are rendered accurately in a reader-friendly manner, true to the original style and tone.
Our QA procedures cover the following aspects:
Linguistic QA
• Use of correct terminology
• Use of appropriate style and tone
• Grammatical accuracy
• Consistency of terms used within documents and across all elements of a project
• Correct interpretation of context
• Instructions have been followed accurately
Checking of the format and layout
As most translations expand compared to the original, it is often necessary to check the formatting of the final translation and make sure the contents fit properly in the space allowed (for tables and text boxes in particular). The font, font size, bolding and other formatting are also systematically checked.
Efficient Project Management is also part of a rigorous QA system. Our experienced team of Project Managers will organise consistency with any existing glossary of previously translated documentation, and warn you of any potential problem related to cultural issues in the process of translation. Efficient communication between the client and the translators is essential to reach the highest levels of quality in translation.
