Automotive Translation – Sailing Through The Challenges
Automotive translation services are quite technical and come with a lot of challenges. It is a rare combination of technical translation with the creativity of marketing and advertising the content. Automotive translation includes the car manufacturers mainly in its client base. These clients know where to go for the right and accurate translation services. The right translation should be consistent, creative, and ensure confidentiality.
Significance of the terminology in automotive content
Technical translation services include the translation of important terminology. The auto industry keeps on evolving and developing new features for performance and safety measurement every other day. A few of these are confined to the particular manufacturer. However, many others work on set standards across the industry. A lot of safety measurements and features become part of the regulatory bodies too. Every new feature requires the technical terminology to communicate to its manufacturer in the right way possible. Additionally, brand terminology also requires interacting with the consumers and letting them know about the particular things. Though most of the manufacturers can offer the same features, these may adopt unique and brand-specialized terms to promote it more widely.
Coping with the sticking to the relevant track
Automotive translation services are significant for a lot of obvious reasons. In order to deliver a seamless translation, the translators require to overcome the challenges of the translation. Staying on the relevant track gets quite tough and challenging with different companies using different terms and terminology for safety features that prevent a driver to drift out of the lane accidentally.
The general terms in this include
- Lane departure warning system (LDW)
- Lane-keeping assist (LKA/LKS)
- Lane-keeping assist (LCA)
It is worth mentioning here that not every manufacturer follows the same terminology to describe these features which is also important for professional translation services. Honda company, for instance, incorporates its feature in the Honda sensing suite and they call it Lane Keeping Assist System. For the Ford company, it is a Lane-keeping system, making difference between lane-keeping aid and lane-keeping alert (the hyphen is important to note here). On the other hand, Audi has named it Active lane assist and it is the overall system Mi-Pilot with Lane Keep Assist for Mitsubishi. An ordinary layman might not observe the difference in these terms; however, it is important for every manufacturer that they use it all consistently. Naturally, these different terms for different companies require the translations accordingly.
Getting familiar with the requirements of the translation?
Different manufacturers handle automotive and technical translation services. So, providing the right translation as per the requirements of the relevant manufacturer and terminology suggested by them also gets draining for the translators. They have to work a lot to navigate through this challenge. Automotive manufacturers make an investment of huge amounts of their resources and efforts to set the brand communications for every newly updated feature. The finalization of the terms is a repetitive process and it requires negotiation, discussion, and awareness of the corporate strategy. Additionally, the product planning staff and teams merge the regulatory and technical consultation with popular tastes to arrive at the vocabulary which is dedicated to brand recognition. The automotive industry is highly competitive and the decision-making process mainly depends on secrecy.
Working with online translation memories and the database
Human translators, though can never be replaced with automated machine translation or translation software, however, these no doubt help through to work and deliver a quality translation. The translation memory saves the previous content and every time translators add the relevant content, it comes up with the saved meanings and suggestions which is indeed a great help but integrating the ongoing translation with the translation memory also gets challenging. Professional translation services are incomplete without going through all the terminology and phrases of the technical automotive industry. A plethora of generic automotive terms and phrases are accepted universally and used by the manufacturers while also maintaining the differences between the brands and their essentials.
Once the terminology and phrases have been set and mutually coordinated with the company and translation agency, the translation vendor can use the translation management system and the memories to save the terminology and phrases so that these can be used every time it is required to offer a consistent translation service. Translation memory is significant to maintaining an important database that helps in paired segments in the source as well as target languages. The translation content which is already gone through translation management and memory is upgraded in translation memory that later helps to pick, identify and track the changes which is a great initiative and help in saving time and money.
Final words
The automotive translation is a skillful, draining, and technical task which requires skilled translators who have the relevant expertise and experience. This domain of translation is technical and comes with a lot of challenges that are important to navigate. Different manufacturers use different terminologies which get challenging to get command of by translators and so is the decision of translation.
