One of our long-term clients, Brian, sent us this message.
“Hey, this is an update to the document you translated for us a month ago. Only a few fixes. I don’t know the exact spots. You can find them, right? And don’t charge me again for what’s done already, okay?”
Me: “Definitely!”
READ MORE >>> How to Manage Projects Towards Success
We helped Brian on a complex mechanical engineering manual translation in Simplified Chinese.
Now his team has updated in that document but cannot spot them.
When you cannot find the revisions, how can you be so sure your translation company does not take advantage of you?
Here are the two ways to find those revisions and avoid being cheated.
MS Word Comparison function
Use “document comparison” function in MS Word. You need to put the old and the recent version of the document to see the detailed revision history. It shows any insertion, deletion, and other changes.
However, if you did not maintain a proper layout sequence, you will probably have a document with more revision tracks than it should.
Adobe Acrobat Professional Comparison function
Use “document comparison” function in Adobe Acrobat Professional. Once you put the old and the recent version, you will receive a comparison report with detailed information on the revised pages. It’s better than the MS Word, especially for brochures that have images and a significant shift in content spots.
However, you still cannot have an accurate number of how much work was done easily.
These two show you an estimate of how much work was involved.
There is a third way a lot smart than these two. I’m introducing you CAT tool.
CAT Tool analysis
No, it’s not a pet tool for your cat. CAT stands for Computer Assisted Translation, which in a layman’s term is a tool that can remember everything – all the words that have been translated and re-use them.
There are quite a few CAT tools on the market, commercial and free ones. They have one thing in common; CAT tools have translation memory and terminology base.
Every translation completed on CAT tool was sent to translation memory (TM), which can later be used to compare and identify which has been translated (matches), which has not (untranslated) and which is in between (fuzzy matches).
In this way, we have a better understanding of exactly how much work is yet to be done for the next project.
We submitted our analysis report for Brian’s new document.
Every 100% match will not be charged, meaning you will never pay for the same translation again!
Fuzzy matches will be charged at a small fraction of standard translation price. Because these would be a simple revision in a sentence that has been translated before.
Untranslated are new words that need to be worked right away.
In short, for this project of 5800 words, only 428 words are new, we have saved Brian $537.20 in total.
Reducing costs for clients is one of our top-priority as a professional translation partner.
