Customer
RE NOVIUM has published award-winning specialist literature for the hospitality sector for more than 45 years. The publisher is also actively involved in educational matters and participates in national and international vocational skills competitions such as SwissSkills and WorldSkills.
Brief
After the successful publication of their series of textbooks for restaurant specialists (Federal Vocational Diploma) and restaurant workers (Federal Vocational Certificate) comprising the six books Service, Food and Nutrition, Sommelier, Barkeeper, Barista and Chef de Rang with more than 1,600 pages in total, RE NOVIUM received multiple awards and, as a result, countless requests from hotel management schools and vocational schools for a French translation.
The task was therefore to take the comprehensive, complex content from InDesign files and translate it in a short period of time while complying with the strict didactic and technical requirements. The translation also needed to include input from external specialists in professional associations and educational authorities.
Solution
In the first stage of the project, Translingua defined the layout for the French books and set a character limit. This made it possible to avoid time-consuming adjustments at the end of the project given the fact that French texts tend to be longer than the German originals. To guarantee consistent terminology, Translingua’s terminologists prepared all the terminology indices at the start of the project, sent them to external experts for approval and then imported the glossary (termbase) into Translingua’s in-house translation memory tool.
Thanks to the use of CAT tools, careful preparation and multiple teams of specialist translators who worked on the books simultaneously and communicated with one another, Translingua was able to achieve absolute terminological consistency despite extremely tight deadlines. The multi-lingual layout of the books, which also included speech bubbles and picture captions, was smoothly transferred into the French translation.
Through their in-depth work with the content of these textbooks, Translingua was also able to generate – as a by-product – valuable content-related input that also increased the consistency of the German source text.
Success factors
- Experienced specialist translators whose mother tongue is the target language
- Early review of terminology lists and creation of termbases in the CAT tool
- Regular contact with the client and the printer’s team of graphic designers
- Experienced project managers who expertly managed and coordinated three teams of translators