Work with Lulu Xu!

Challenge: audience changed.

One of my clients in the electronic field wanted to market its content via some popular Chinese social media such as Douyin (Tik-Tok), WeChat, etc. The content needed to prompt is very technical which is originally targeted to engineers, if release directly, the audience on those social media will not be interested. Therefore, the client wants to summarize and extract the content, making it easy to understand and keep the key information.

Solution:

1. Before translation, I proofread the source English and modify it with track change then deliver it to SME. SME will check all the modifications and finalize the content which is the source content to translate.
2. While translating, I used terms that are easy to understand by most Chinese people and keep the style natural and simple.

Challenge: the content is too technical to understand.

There are many technical articles written by engineers, some of them may not very good in English and prefer using many terms or abbreviates, which is very hard to understand unless you are one of
them.

Solution:

1. An engineer served as an SME (subject matter expert) and I often asked him about any unclear content in the source. After I got the answers, I tried to learn the related knowledge and make a note.
2. I collected all the terms/abbreviates/slangs into a glossary and made a Trados glossary. The translations of these words will pop up while translating and can be checked with Xbench or Verifika after finishing.
3. Learn the basic knowledge of such a field. I bought some books as per the suggestion of the SME.

Background: A law firm is a big client of my previous company.
I was assigned the role of editor and team lead and finished it on time with praise from the client.

Challenge: quality may be not stable.
There were more than 10 translators involved in this project due to the tight TAT, and the client has no reference material such as TM or glossary.

Solution:

1. Before kicking-off this project officially, I communicated with the client about the style then compiled a style guide that introduced the background, tone and specific instructions on content and details.
2. I suggested PM to use the TM of a similar project before for reference, and use the existing glossary of patent translation in the communication field as the glossary of this project.
3. I wrote many QA rules into Trados QA settings to apply the instructions in the style guide as many as possible.