The increased need for professional translations also demands advanced technology that would support translators to manage high volumes of translation quickly. Linguistic software has been around for a while now, and its demand is growing rapidly in the translation industry. You may find many linguistic tools online with different specifications and features. However, typically, these linguistic systems are designed to generate quick translations for any given text. They process the source text, perform translations, and display the translated text on the screen. These systems can also get data in the form of pictures and audio.
Using linguistic software can support translation agencies, language service providers, and freelancer translations to seamlessly handle the everyday translation workload. However, it is important to know how to use linguistic tools correctly. This article provides step-by-step guidelines to make you understand how you can effectively use professional linguistic software to your benefit.
Step-by-Step Guide to Using Linguistic Software for Your Business Translations
Step 1: Choosing the Right Linguistic Software
Finding the right linguistic software that perfectly caters to your translation needs is the most important thing, to begin with. For choosing a suitable linguistic tool, you have to consider various factors.
- Your software should be easy to use with an interactive interface, so you don’t have to spend time training your translators about using the tool.
- Ease of implementation and maintenance is also an important factor to consider; you better not choose software with complex procedures and programming.
- Consider the features the software provides, the language pairs it supports, and the customization options it is offering to fulfil your translation needs.
- Choose software that follows firm security protocols and is also compliant with data privacy and confidentiality regulations.
- Lastly, pricing is another important factor, because, in the end, you have to stay within your budget and find the tool that serves your best interests affordably.
Step 2: Preparing Your Documents for Translation
Once you’ve grabbed reliable software for your translation project, it’s time to make your documents ready for translation. Your translation management tools may provide different content management that would help you effectively manage, analyze, and store your documents. Following are some best practices to prepare and optimize your content for localization.
- Start with organizing your source files to make the translation process seamless. For this, you can break down your content into smaller sections to fit the string size.
- To avoid cultural issues, make sure the source text doesn’t contain rigid cultural references or idioms that might not make any sense when translated.
- Make sure to provide contextual guidelines with your source texts to make it easier for the system to comprehend the intentions behind a particular piece of content.
- If your document contains any personal data that is meant to be private, you must hide it before uploading it into a third-party system.
- Double-check your document, and review the file structure. Make the required changes to make everything more clear, so you don’t face any delays in content delivery.
Step 3: Translating and Reviewing Your Documents with Linguistic Software
Linguistic software comes with smart features to help you translate, manage and store your documents all in one place. Here is how you can use linguistic software for translations.
- Simply upload your source documents to the system you have previously prepared for translations.
- Choose the language/s you want to translate your document into.
- The software will take a few seconds to translate your documents; however, translation might contain some contextual and cultural errors.
- Assign your translated document to a professional linguist for manual proofreading and editing.
- Once the document is finalized, you can perform another automated QA testing; most linguistic software contains QA features that will help you detect and eliminate potential errors in your document.
- You are done with translation, now you can deliver the translated documents to targeted clients.
Step 4: Integrating Your Third-party Apps into Your Linguistic Software
Another great benefit of linguistic software is that it may provide support for third-party integrations that make translation and localization management even more seamless and hassle-free. Most linguistic tools also act as a localization project management platform that helps you perform other localization tasks. Following are a few advantages of using linguistic software integrations.
- You don’t have to switch between different apps to perform different translation operations. Professional linguistic tools allow you to fulfil all your translation needs without leaving the platform.
- It eliminates the likelihood of errors and blunders that happen when you keep shifting your content to different platforms to perform different operations.
- Integrations save your localization team’s time. You only have to perform actions on content through the platform, and it gets automatically updated on the integrated website, app, or software.
- It may also provide support for design integration tools that allow you to localize other user-facing elements on your website or app directly from the software.
Final Thoughts!
Professional linguistic tools can be a great investment when it comes to translation project management. It automates your translation operations and reduces manual efforts significantly. So, whether you are a professional linguist, a translation agency, or an LSP, having a linguistic system by your side can turn things in your favour and make your localization journey effortless.
