Pre-reading

Here we have a point that very few translators wish to discuss. I myself very rarely read through an entire document before starting to translate. There are two good reasons for this.

1. The time requirements of commercial translation in Japan seldom provide enough time to pre-read.

2. With enough experience, a brief skim through the document is usually enough to discover errors.

One measure of an experienced translator is the ability to accurately judge when the translator should stop pre-reading and start translating. Too little pre-reading by an inexperienced translator results in false starts.

Translation

I now move into the translation phase. An important part of this for me is eliminating some of the drudgery of typing. Being a Word user, I use the simplest and closest (but certainly not most powerful) device available: Word's Autocorrect function. For me, this provides an on-the-fly expansion of keystroke sequences and the ability to quickly program new sequences as words come up in the manuscript repeatedly. I have a standard set of abbreviations that I keep in the dictionary, and new ones that I add and remove for each job. The two lists at the end of yesterday's work (a semiconductor patent specification) are given below.

Resting. When into the actual translation process, I tend to break for about 5 minutes each hour, to glance at e-mail for example, or make coffee. My lunch breaks usually run over an hour, but I work late in the day. A typical work day will see me working more than 10 hours net translating time.

Research while translating. Having now installed a broadband connection, I usually keep my Web browser window open for research while I am translating. That said, because I tend to work in fields I know, this research is quite limited.

Errors in the original. During the translation process, I often discover errors made by the author. These are usually things like incorrect reference numerals, incorrect references to drawings, and references to incorrect independent claims appearing in dependent claims. These errors are easy to discover when you are reading for understanding the invention while you translate the specification, something that not all translators apparently do.

Correct yourself and flag with a comment. If I am sure that an error exists and know the correction to be made, I work the correction into the translation and flag the corrected location. Most of my clients prefer that I do this, rather than leave the error in the translation.

Check the Translation

Time permitting, I prefer to check a translation at least a day after I completed the first translation. I find that the quality of the checking process improves significantly by letting the document sit overnight. I used to be an adherent of the inherited wisdom that on-screen checking is more difficult and not as good as checking a printed out version of a translation. I have since overcome that aversion to screen checking, while maintaining the understanding of the need to be very careful when checking a displayed document.