Tips for MSDS Translation Projects
by Olga Pechnenko Kopp
McElroy Translation's experience in the chemical industry is very deep. In fact our first client in 1968 was a chemical company. Since that time many changes in the technology have happened but there is one thing that will never change within the chemical industry: the importance of quality. People’s lives and health depend upon safety procedures being followed correctly and a poorly translated MSDS incurs potential risk.
Today I will talk about how to decrease the cost of the translation MSDS project without sacrificing the quality.
The cost depends on the volume of a project
Those of you who have talked on the phone with me know that I always ask many questions about your project. Of course if you just have one MSDS to be translated, it makes no sense to talk about a volume discount. But let's say you have ten MSDS for translation into five languages. This kind of project would immediately catch my eye, because I will want to know if all ten could be translated at the same time. (Sometimes your company may not have even finished creating some of them.) In this case I will recommend that you wait to begin the process of translation. Why?
At McElroy Translation we use translation memory (TM) tools. With TM tools, blocks of text that have been previously translated can be saved and reused to speed up turnaround and enhance consistency. Before the translation begins, we can perform an analysis on your MSDS to obtain statistics for a quote that will reflect the reuse of text that occurs during translation. For a very large number of MSDS, the cost per MSDS can decrease by up to 80%.
Provide editable files
In order to gain all of the advantages TM offers without incurring desktop publishing charges, there is one caveat: the files have to be in an editable format. PDFs are sometimes merely "pictures" of text and the text can't be edited. McElroy does have Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software that allows pictures of text to be converted into an editable file but all formatting is lost and each document must be reviewed for errors prior to translation.
Editable files could be a text file, Word file, Excel file, PowerPoint files, html files, etc. The advantages of using editable files are that you will receive a translation that is formatted the same as the original without paying extra for recreation of the graphics and formatting AND you can take advantage of TM.
Follow best practices guidelines for authoring MSDS
McElroy Translation recommends that our clients begin thinking about content translation at the authoring stage. Make sure technical writers follow best practices guidelines. They shouldn't use idiomatic expressions or concepts that don’t translate well (or at all!) into other languages. Most MSDS technical writers already follow these guidelines and they use the same template of standard information from one document to another. In this respect, the MSDS market is typically ahead of the curve.
Translate MSDS phrases in context
We've also noticed that MSDS software is popular with a lot of our clients because MSDS-authored documents output MSDS in a format that is instantly ready for use. However, when the translation process is considered, some dangerous side effects could arise from employing MSDS software. Translation is still performed by a human and even if separate phrases are translated into another language, you can't just put the phrases together without a contextual reference. Even if you are translating the entire existing database of separate phrases into several languages, remember that the outputted or assembled MSDS will still need to be edited and proofed by technical linguists to ensure the target phrases fit together to accurately express the source. Providing complete source language MSDS will save you money in the long run and you avoid the business risks associated with a faulty translation.
So to summarize, in order to decrease the cost of your next MSDS project, try to:
- Translate the entire project and not individual files
- Provide editable files
- Make sure the English version is written according to best practices guidelines
- Provide MSDS phrases in context
If you have any questions or if you have a project coming up, please let me know so we can go over it to make your project less costly and not compromise the quality.
Olga Pechnenko Kopp
email:
phone: 800-531-9977 or 1-512-472-6753
