Three places technical translation breaks

A translator will handle complex sentences. What fails is this:

  • Units of measurement. Inches against millimetres, pounds against kilograms, psi against bar. A translator without an engineering background sometimes converts where conversion is wrong because the figure is a standard one — and fails to convert where it matters.
  • Component designations and part numbers. The same item can acquire two different names in two sections if two people worked without a shared glossary. To the person assembling it, those are two different items.
  • Abbreviations. In technical text they are industry-specific and often ambiguous: the same abbreviation means different things in electrics and in hydraulics. Expanding them blind is dangerous.

A glossary is not a formality

For a single document a glossary is overhead. For a set of ten or more, and especially for cooperation that will run for years, it solves the central problem of technical translation: consistency.

Without one, every new batch is a fresh lottery of terms. The client notices not immediately but when a fitter asks why the manual calls a component something other than the drawing does.

If you already have in-house terminology — even as a spreadsheet or in old translations — that beats any external dictionary. Send it at the start and we will work from it rather than alongside it.

What to do with drawings

If the file is editable we work inside it: lettering stays in place and the structure is preserved.

If the drawing is a scan or a PDF without a text layer, three approaches work, and the choice depends on what happens next: a correspondence table linking original and translation to positions, an overlay on a copy of the drawing, or full reproduction in an editable format. The last is the most expensive and is not always needed.

Tell us what the drawing is for: agreement with a contractor, submission to a permitting authority, or use on site. That determines both format and price.

How to spend less without losing anything

Send documents in batches rather than one at a time: the glossary then works for you instead of being rebuilt each time.

Give access to earlier translations if they exist. Even imperfect ones show the language established in your company.

Do not send scans of what you hold in editable form. Working from a scan costs more, and that line in the estimate is often avoidable.

Mark what actually needs translating. Large documentation sets usually contain sections nobody will read in the target language.