Back Translation is the process of retranslating a document from the target language to source language, to verify how accurate the process of translation has been. The back translation is usually is carried out by a translator other than the original translator of the document, whose expertise is atleast on par with the translator of the original document.
Back translation is commonly used by organizations that are heavily involved in research and product testing; typically these are biotech companies, pharmaceutical companies and survey organizations and the like. Such companies frequently require to localize their content for their target users. However the risk of losing/mutilating information in translation is ever present. A literal translation never works, because there are many factors that need to be accommodated in the process of translation, for example an original document may have words for which there are no literal equivalents in the target language, sometimes it may happen that a so-called literal equivalent might have a completely different meaning/effect than originally intended.
This is where the experience and personal judgment of a translator comes into play where he/she fashions a translation to make it as authentic and consistent with the original as possible. However this also means that when the document is back translated it would not match with the original. But that does not mean that the original translation was inaccurate. This is why back translation is not always reliable especially for verifications between source and target languages which have significantly different characteristics.
So are there alternative ways of verifying language translation? The answer is yes. We need to understand first that back translation as a method to verify translations was started long back. We have come a long way since then and it’s prudent to have an effective translation strategy in order to ensure accurate and high quality translation.
- Firstly, all translations should be managed effectively right from the beginning i.e. the creation of the original content. Any errors in the source content can cause heavy losses further down the localization process.
- Use of translation memories is fairly common nowadays, they are an asset and should be managed intelligently. The organization should develop a proper strategy for managing translation memory which should include collection, maintenance and scrubbing. Apart from translation memories, it’s also important to maintain terminology guides for various target languages.
- A quality control process should be established to ensure that all the steps required for the translation management strategy are properly implemented, including the selection of translators who are not only skilled in the required languages and knowledge areas, but also have a solid understanding of the target market.
Incorporating all the above elements effectively into a translation strategy would ensure much better results than any amount of back translations.
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