Translating for the Energy Sector
Managing specific terminology across multiple languages
Our client is one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies.
This project involved the translation of its internal code of conduct documents into Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indonesian and Thai.
What challenge did we take on?
- The extensive documentation contained a large amount of industry and client-specific terminology which required accurate and thoroughly consistent translations.
- As well as requiring consistency within each language version, our client contact also needed to control the use of acronyms and English wording for specific terms across all language versions.
- We also needed to make it easy for our client contact, who speaks only English, to control which terms were to be left in English.
What did we do?
First of all, we created a glossary of English terms. This was submitted to our client contact so she could identify the terms and acronyms which were to be left in English.
We then translated the remaining glossary terms into each of the target languages, specifying the English terms and acronyms which we had been instructed not to translate.
Each language glossary was reviewed by an in-country manager on the client side. They approved the proposed translations and had the opportunity to comment on our client contact’s decisions about the use of certain English terms.
Armed with the approved glossaries, our translators proceeded with the translation of the documentation, referring to the glossary and using the relevant terms where appropriate.
Which tools did we use?
In order to guarantee consistency of terminology throughout the documents and to facilitate the translation process, our translators used Trados Translation Memory and Terminology software.
As the translators worked their way through the documents, these Computer Aided Translation (CAT) tools recognised words that appeared in the glossary and proposed the approved terms as probable translations.
What was the outcome?
The careful approach of creating glossaries and using CAT tools was instrumental in meeting the client’s requirements and optimising the efficiency of the workflow.
Our client contact knew that her instructions were applied to all languages without needing to check any of them herself and the in-country managers were delighted to receive well-written, accurate translations which contained the exact terms they would have used if they had written the documents themselves.
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