yndigo

Mastering the legal translator’s most popular tool

The translation industry is creating and improving software all the time to help translators do their jobs. Still, we haven’t scrapped an old standby: Microsoft Word. And no group knows this more than legal translators, who use Word every day, yet many have still not harnessed all of its power.

A translation teacher of mine once reminded her students that when all is said and done, the translator is selling a document. I took this to mean that the look of the translated file has a value separate from the words and that it goes a long way toward convincing the client of the value of the translation. I’ve come to realize how right she was and how important formatting skills are. But they take a bit of effort to acquire.

Getting the page on the screen to look like the original is the first battle. Using the correct tools to do it is another feat entirely. For example, revealing the codes* on the page (by pressing the “¶” button) will show whether the space bar was mistakenly used in place of the tab key; the tab key in place of indents; manual numbering in place of auto-numbering; returns to insert a page in place of a page break; page numbers in the body in place of the footer; tabs to create a table in place of the table tool, etc., etc.

So what? Fair question until you’ve tried to edit one of these translations. It may look exactly like the source, but the moment a word is added or taken away, formatting breaks down and it can take a lot of time to repair. The worst file I ever saw used the space bar — no tabs, no indents, no tables — to position all the text on the page. I mean, tabs and indents even existed on manual typewriters!

Of course many translators are light years ahead of casual Word users when it comes to formatting but you’d be surprised how many still need to learn the basics. If the only feature you’ve mastered in your word processor is typing, realize that this leaves the agency with lots of work to do before they can submit your translation to the client. Take a little time to teach yourself some tricks. To start I would stress: justification, indenting, tables, headers/footers, and autonumbering (in that order), as especially useful to know. Here is Microsoft’s official training page. Other tutorials exist on the internet, too.

It is important to remember that when working with a translation agency, good formatting is a business consideration since a well formatted document will save a project manager lots of time and make him or her very happy so they’ll keep coming back for more.

* Of course former WordPerfect users will rant uncontrollably about the “reveal codes” issue; forced to migrate to the now dominant word processor, many will still tell you how much better WordPerfect’s “reveal codes” feature was and how with Word, many formatting glitches are still unresolvable.