What is Translation Context? How to Share the Correct Context with Translators?

There’s an evolving mindset that any company can be born global as well as reach out to foreign markets from day one.

Even though eager businesses might be always up to entering the worldwide market, it’s ideal to take things steadily and focus on maintaining quality in your essential content localization campaigns.

The primary step in localization is the supreme quality content. While working with your translators, it’s essential to pay more attention to translating context.

Introduction To Translation Context

A translator Should know your text before they can efficiently translate it. Providing your translators with as much contextual information as possible will assist in hugely boosting the quality of your translation.

Why is context so vital? Because translation of any word or phrase from English to any foreign language can differ hugely.

When the word is translated can rely highly on certain factors – gender, subject matter, case, and whether the original word is a verb, noun, or adjective.

For example, let’s use the word “turn” in different ways that reflect different contexts.

✔ Making a right turn.
✔ Please turn the page
✔ Your next turn in a game.
✔ A turn of events.
✔ The climate turning hot.
✔ That turned out to be a poor fit.

This list could go much longer! It’s unbelievable when you carefully translate a document, the single word “turn” in various languages will cover every one of these contexts. So, it’s good to leave several clues for your translators to assist them to understand the right meaning.

And we call such clues translation context.

Ways to Share the Correct Context with Translators

Here are a few ways to assist your translators to get the best possible translation of your content.

1- Providing Situational Context

The primary step you must always take while asking a translator to translate any content is to provide situational context. By this, we mean providing a broader picture of the situation.

This is crucial for translators to take into consideration when accurately translate your documents from base language to target language.

Let’s look at an example sentence.

English: Do you want to go to the shop?

For a translator, it would be difficult to translate this sentence into French, because he might not know whom the question is addressing.

If some situational context about this sentence is provided, like the final translation has to target a younger audience and should sound casual, a translator could effectively translate this into:

French: Veux tu venir au magasin?

2- Providing Textual Context

To boost the translation quality, it’s good to leave context notes for your native translators so they can get the idea of the context of any fiddly phrases, words, or slang. Missing context can instantly boost the chances of several errors in your content.

At times, you may have to follow the latest localization trends to make your content extremely localization-friendly. Think about modifying your English original text to ignore confusing words for native translators.

For instance, a sentence such as “you might run into errors if you tap the Exit button” could be translated as “you might jog into errors if you tap the Exit button.”

Rather, you can enhance clarity with the right phase with clear context: “Avoid clicking the Exit button”.

3- Providing Visual Context

Another right method to share the right translation context is with visuals.

Visual context can prove to be helpful for translators at a effective translation company in Bangalore to know the right meaning of your source language.

Here are a few things you can do to share visual contexts:

✔ Screenshots: Share a screenshot of a word or phrase that makes your context quite clearer for the translator.

✔ Images and Diagrams with Notes: Another easiest way to provide context is to utilize a diagram or an image to make your translator see what you’re describing. For more complex products with industry-specific jargon, sharing illustrations or diagrams can assist your translators to know your context and avoid any translation errors.

In Conclusion

Please remember, translation is not simply done word by word! All words comprise their single equivalent in the target language.

When it is about communication in any language, context is really very important. For effective translation, it is better to make your translators know the context of the information you have shared. Use the above-mentioned ways and you are good to go!

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