Background

A Canadian international agency, specialized in aviation, selected wintranslation as its French translation partner to deliver highly technical aviation e-learning courseware consisting of more than 230,000 words.

The Challenge

The client provided the documents for translation in PDF format. This includes two different subject fields, each one containing two student binders, consisting of eight to 18 modules. In total, the client provided wintranslation with 44 PDF files and 1,285 pages of documents to be translated.

Translating PDF files directly is not an impossible mission, but it is a very laborious and time consuming process. Consequently, translators’ efficiency and consistency is very low in such situations.

The Solution

File formatting
wintranslation’s project manager assigned to this project worked with three different desktop publishing (DTP) teams in order to convert the PDF files into editable Microsoft Word files – a format that allowed translators to work faster and keep the design and the content consistent throughout the entire project.
Terminology
During the same phase, an experienced terminology professional extracted the key terms from all the files and built the project terminology.  Read more about the terminology challenge.

Consistency
To maximize consistency, wintranslation leverages translation technologies that enable the use of terminology databases and translated content (translation memories). Each document is translated, revised and proofread by separate individuals, so that all potential issues (such as mistranslations and typographical errors) are corrected before releasing the final version of a document. For this project, wintranslation used memoQ.

Translation and editing:
For this project, wintranslation employed an in-house full time translator, two freelance translators, two editors and one reviewer.

The Benefit

The full 230,000 words were translated and edited in three months and the manuals were delivered by the deadline.