The most common is translation errors, and it is difficult to find electronic engineers with good English to do document translation.
When I was working on my engineering degree I supported myself in part by working as a translator, and the cardinal rule of translation was always: translate into (not from) your native language. The vast majority (like, 95%) of translation issues are caused by people who are translating into their non-native language. A Chinese -> English translation would always (ideally) be done by a native English speaker.
Absolutely. I worked as a technical translator for one big product (a decent size software package plus all the documentation -- user manual, help files, correspondence templates, website, etc.) from German to English. Since I also did support for the product, sometimes I'd have to write a brand new FAQ, for example, and I'd typically do it in English and then write a draft in German, but always gave it to a native speaker for proofreading. My German is good enough that it wouldn't have been
bad, just not
perfect.Having a native speaker edit / proofread a translation by a non-native is also very much hit or miss: there's only so such "editing / proofing" you can do before it turns into a re-translation job.
Yep. In fact, that's how I got the job doing the software translation: originally, a Swiss employee had done an initial translation to English, and of course the owners figured they just needed a native speaker to proofread it. But after discovering some translations that were so off that I couldn't figure out what they meant (or worse: ones that look right superficially, but are actually quite wrong!), it quickly became apparent that going back to the original German to verify the intent, and then comparing that to the "English" translation, was actually more time-consuming than simply starting over. So we trashed the nonnative translation and I did a whole new one. Along the way, it became a great UX review of the original German, since if a user interface is hard to describe, it may well be hard to use, too! And we found some interesting things, too, like: Was the original German menu item "Titel bearbeiten" singular or plural? For English, I had to know, since "Edit title" and "Edit titles" are not the same. But in German, since that particular word lacks a plural marker, they'd never thought about it! Sometimes, I'd reword things in English, and the boss liked it so much, he retranslated it back into German. (The company was run by academics at the time, and they were great at writing very verbose prose, but not the concise text needed for user interfaces. But they could
translate concisely!)
I had to immerse myself in the language of library science to do that job, but the end result was quite good.
If anyone cares, that product is
Citavi, a reference management program (like, to help you with a bibliography). Mind you, it's been 10 years since I left that company, so the product (and thus the language) has evolved since then. But I did take a look at the latest version recently (and, in fact, used it for real for the first time on a publication of my own!), and it looks like all the major terminology and wording is still mine.
Home
Help
Search
Login
Register
