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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 occurred 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.
How can you control the cost of your MSDS translation project without sacrificing quality?
Cost Depends on Volume
Those of you who have called us know that we 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 MSDSs for translation into five languages. This kind of project would immediately catch our eye, because we 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 we 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 includes the reuse of text that occurs during translation. For a very large number of MSDSs, the cost per MSDS can decrease by up to 80 percent.
Providing 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 editable files, but all formatting is lost and each document must be reviewed for errors prior to translation.
Editable files could be text files, Word files, Excel files, 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 graphics and formatting and you can take advantage of TM.
Following Best Practices Guidelines for Authoring MSDSs
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 the next. In this respect, the MSDS market is typically ahead of the curve.
Translating MSDS Phrases in Context
We've also noticed that MSDS software is popular with a lot of our clients because MSDS-authored documents output safety information 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 these phrases together without a contextual reference. Even if you are translating the entire existing database of separate phrases into several languages, remember that the output 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 MSDSs will save you money in the long run, and you avoid the business risks associated with a faulty translation.
To summarize, in order to control the cost of your next MSDS project, remember to:
• Look at your translation job as an entire project and not individual files
• Provide editable files
• Make sure your English version is written according to best practices guidelines
• Consider MSDS phrases in context
If you have any questions or if you have a project coming up, please contact us so we can go over it to make your project less costly and not compromise the quality.
Vlada Kuznetsova
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