Studio Bouček. Translation of technical documentation.

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Translation of technical documentation

Our company is specialized in extensive translation of technical documentation from German and English into Czech. Our domain is automotive technology, machinery, electronics and computing technology.

In translations we use modern techniques called CAT (Computer Aided Translation), namely the system , which significantly increases efficiency and reduces error rate with large projects.

At present, our company reaches an annual performance of approx. 10 million words, which equals about 30,000 pages. Evidently, proof-reading of translated texts is included - we cooperate with experts in different branches, incl. linguists.
The Trados system reaches best results with so-called tagged (markup) texts like XML, SGML, e.g. Our supporting technicians are able to adapt any other data formats, incl. unique machine formats. Tagged formats are very suitable for routine, automated publishing (supported by FrameMaker, Quark XPress, etc.) of product sheets, manuals etc., both as printouts, PDF files or web publishing (HTML).

What is the difference between Machine Translation (MT) and Computer Aided Translation (CAT)?

Programs working on the base of MT support translation from a certain source language into a certain target language. They include large, built-in dictionaries and language-specific grammar algorithms. They recognize the basic scheme of the source sentence (subject, predicate, secondary elements), detect single words and translate the entire sentence using the built-in dictionaries. The advantage of such solution is usability by persons whose knowledge of the source (target) language is not sufficient for translating. The disadvantage is a low quality of translation. Often happens that the source and target sentences do not agree. Usage of those products is limited to rough reference translation of incoming letters, catalogues, web pages, etc

On the other hand, programs on the base of CAT are open for a large number of languages. The producer does not implement any dictionaries or any language-specific knowledge. These solutions are destined for professional translators and agencies. The translator first translates each sentence (phrase) and the program stores the created pair "source/target sentence" into a translation memory. Continuously, the translation memory grows up being filled with other translated pairs and an outstanding feature shows up: Whenever you meet an identical sentence you do not need to design or write the translation again. The unique technology even finds translations of similar (not identical) sentences or phrases. You can be supported by your own company/branch dictionaries. The advantage is a high productivity of translation (becomes evident with large documents/projects), precision (the program does not invent any translated sentences, it only uses sentences translated and stored by the translator) and a significant reduction of translating costs. Obviously, the clients also participate in the cost savings. A "relative" disadvantage is restriction of advantages listed above for tagged texts - the program is not as efficient with other formats, starting from MS Word up to unique machine formats. Nevertheless, our skilled programmers design converters (filters) for any formats so that the implementation of the CAT technology is as efficient as possible.