The language of Gujarati, also known as Gujarati or Gujerati, is the official language of the State of Gujarat. The language is named after the Gurjar/Gujar community people, who are said to have settled in the region sometime in the middle of the 5th century C.E.
The language is actually a part of the Indo-Aryan family, which is a branch of the Indo-European languages. It also comes under one of the 22 official languages recognized by the Government of India. Apart from Gujarat, this language is also spoken in the adjacent union territories of Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli. The Gujarati language stands at the 26th position among the most spoken native languages in the world, and nearly 46.1 million people speak Gujarati throughout the world.
To be successful, large translation projects require careful preparation, appropriate and qualified resources, and ongoing management. Here's how, we just completed a large volume translation assignment in record time.
Large volume with short time delivery projects come with their own unique set of challenges.
- We received a rush project into Gujarati language with 70k words to be provided within 15 days and the client needed to deliver it on batch wise, no extensions were permitted due to the client's unique requirement.
- This project's subject was Medical, which required extra careful translation due to the numerous medical words.
- Time constraints are generally more challenging when a project has tight deadlines, putting pressure on the translator and increasing the possibility of errors.
- Non-compliance with the quality process can also be a danger, and thus it is critical to verify that all processes are followed correctly.
- The volume of the project would mean that multiple linguists would need to work on the project, with quality to maintain. This presented challenges not only in terms of recruiting the right linguists with a suitable profile, but also ensuring that quality would be maintained even when working with multiple linguists. There were many instructions to be followed, and the same to be followed by each linguist.
- Maintaining accuracy and consistency of translation is crucial, especially when it comes to errors in the target language. In translation, it can be a challenge when multiple translators are working on a large volume of content. This is especially critical when certain terminology or phrases must be precisely and consistently translated throughout the document.
- Quality assurance (QA) is an important aspect of the translation process, since it ensures that the translated text is free of errors and fulfils the appropriate quality standards. For big volume translation projects, QA can be time-consuming and difficult, especially when working with tight deadlines.
- To work on this project, a solid technological infrastructure would be required. QA should be performed correctly to ensure that all instructions are followed and consistency is maintained.
Before the project began, we set about making a plan. What we did was as follows:
- A kick-off meeting was held before the project began.
- As there was no Glossary term list shared by client side, so we have prepared the list of glossary terms at our end to keep the consistency in the entire project as it is to be divided into multiple translators.
- We hired resources who were skilled at translating this kind of medical content for the Gujarati language and had a solid grasp of the target markets. We reviewed the linguist's resume and prior work evaluations. We used 2 translators and one Reviewer for this project.
- We put in place a progress tracking mechanism for better visibility and control of the project, as the client required batch wise deliveries in every 4th day.
- We scheduled the delivery dates for each linguist batch wise and did daily tracking. It is not easy to work with multiple translators or track multiple files. Our team prepared a well-structured schedule with the information of the files, names of translators, and estimated dates for completing each activity. Regular tracking helped us get better visibility of the progress of the work. We could also see any potential for delays and take quick decisions to resolve the problem.
- We divided the work into batches and worked on them in parallel.
- We worked on the project using Trados tool for consistency and fixed the QA issues after delivery of each batch files.
- We involved a single reviewer so that consistency is maintained in the entire project.
- We gave linguists the same guidelines, prepared a glossary list and instructions that they must adhere to while working on the project. This guideline emphasized the need for better quality consideration of the content and target audience.
We completed a challenging project within a given short time and to a high standard.
- The client was pleased with the quick turnaround time we provided without sacrificing quality.
- We consistently followed all the suggested instructions.
- The client will be pleased to share such large volume projects with us in the future, as they may get more large volume projects from their end customer after this project submission.
In the future, we are confident in our capacity to finish such sizable projects on a short timeline.