How to Get the Best Vietnamese Translations?

Translators are not the only ones who are responsible for the quality of your Vietnamese translation project. How well you prepare for the project, in fact, reflects significantly on its outcome. If you overlook the importance of the preparation step, there is a high chance that your Vietnamese translations turn out to be sloppy or not as expected.

So in this post, let’s discuss some of the most effective tips and practices that you should apply when preparing for your upcoming Vietnamese translation projects.

1. Have a Clear Goal

Having a good plan with a clear goal is a determining factor for a successful Vietnamese translation project. What do you expect to gain from the project? How do you tell if the project is successful or not? Make sure you have the answers to these questions before kicking off your Vietnamese translation project.

What’s equally important is that you and your Vietnamese translators must be on the same page about the project’s goal. That means you should inform them of your expected outcomes and give them as much contextual information as possible.

• • A description of the target audience – You should provide your Vietnamese translators with a description of your customer profile – Who are they? Where are their locations? Do they have a good background in your field or know very little? All of this information ensures that the language used in the translations is not overly complicated or overly simplified for the intended Vietnamese audience.
  • Your expected outcomes – Do you need ready-to-publish documents or simply a summary to grasp the general idea of a document? Tell your translators your expectations so that they can better meet your needs.
  • Your expected layouts – You should also specify the file types (.doc,.pdf,.xlx, etc.) and layouts you require so that the translators can adjust their translations to fit the expectation.
  • Other important notes (if any)

2. Optimize Your Source Content Before Translation

Make sure you carefully review your source content before sending it to your Vietnamese translators. If your source content is bad-written and inconsistent, your Vietnamese translators will have a hard time figuring out the meanings of your content. The translators might have to ask you for an explanation. This will involve a lot of emails back and forth between translators and your company. That’s why to save time for both sides, you should always optimize the source documents beforehand.

The majority of Vietnamese translators and translation agencies charge by the number of words they translate. That is, if you can reduce the number of words, you can reduce the translation costs for your Vietnamese translation project. Here are some tips for creating cost-effective translation-friendly content:

• • Reduce the use of wordy sentences and long words.
  • Remove any unnecessary parts of your content, such as idioms, metaphors, jargon, or expressions that are only known in the source language.
  • Avoid using text in graphics. To translate text in an image or chart, translators extract the text from the graphic, translate it into Vietnamese, and then add the Vietnamese translations into the image. This process takes a great deal of time. Thus, instead of embedding text into graphics, you should use captions.
  • Leave some space for text expansion when translating content into Vietnamese.

3. Create a Style Guide

A translation style guide is a series of rules set by your company on language usage, composition, and orthography for translators to follow. It tells your Vietnamese translators your preference for translation tone, writing style, spelling, punctuation, and other textual and visual elements.

The purpose of a style guide is to guarantee translation quality and a consistent brand voice for your company.

What to include in your Vietnamese translation style guide?

• • General information – Your company products and services, target audience profile, project overview, project’s goals, etc.
  • Tones of voice – Which tone of voice do you want your translators to use? (e.g. simple, casual, formal, etc.)
  • Linguistic preferences – Spelling (Northern, Central, or Southern Vietnamese spellings), abbreviations and acronyms, punctuation, names and addresses, numbers and measurements.
  • Do-not-translate list (e.g. products names, person names, website, etc.)

3. Use a glossary

A translation glossary is a collection of key terminology used in the source content that needs to be translated and their definitions. Your company’s approved translations for those terms might also be included.

• • Terminology in the source language (Required)
  • Definitions of terms in the source language (Required)
  • Approved Vietnamese translations for the terms (Optional)

You can download the template of a standard Vietnamese translation glossary here.

4. Make the most of technology

The translation industry has long been misunderstood as a “human-only” industry, despite the fact that it is greatly aided by many software and apps, particularly CAT Tools. CAT Tools, with the assistance of Translation Memory (TM), allow you to save money and time as translators do not have to pay full price for previously translated words. By making the most of this technology, you can easily achieve both goals: higher quality and lower cost.

If your Vietnamese translation project runs in a long-term period, CAT Tools will be more beneficial. The money you pay decreases as the TM grows larger and larger after each task.

5. Work with Professional Vietnamese Translation Providers

Although price is an important factor when it comes to Vietnamese translation projects, you should not choose price over quality and work with any Vietnamese translation provider that gives you the lowest rates. Make sure you always work with professional Vietnamese linguists if you want to achieve excellent quality Vietnamese translations.

The translators you should work with must be native Vietnamese linguists having both a thorough understanding of the language pair and expertise in your industry. Following are some criteria to consider when choosing your translation partners:

• • They must be native speakers of the Vietnamese language.
  • At least two years of experience in the translation industry is required.
  • A great understanding of a specific industry is desired.
  • Work experience in the related field is a plus.

If you are looking for a translation agency in Vietnam that meets the all mentioned criteria, look no further than GTE Localize. Based in Vietnam, GTE Localize has a deep network of native Vietnamese translators to serve various language pairs. Our team has years of experience in translating content for various industries for the Vietnamese market.

Tell us more about your projects and get a free quote.