What Are Linguistic Assets? Only the Foundation of Your Translation Program.

In the language services industry, the term “Linguistic Assets” is widely used, but what exactly are they?

Linguistic assets are tools that help translation and localization professionals ensure consistency, accuracy, and brand voice across translated content. Essentially, they are pre-built reference guides used during translation projects. These assets are crucial for maintaining high translation quality and consistency, ensuring your business's terminology is always up-to-date and on-brand.

The Core Components of Linguistic Assets

Linguistic assets comprise three core areas: Translation Memories, Translation Glossaries, and Style Guides. Let's take a detailed look at each one.

Translation Memory (TM)

A Translation Memory (TM) is a database that stores previously translated segments of text along with their corresponding translations in different languages. When working on a new project, the TM can be searched to see if any existing translations match the source text. If a match is found (either a complete or partial match), the translator can reuse the existing translation, saving time and effort.

Benefits of Translation Memory:

• Cost Reduction: By storing phrases and sentences from previous projects, translators can reuse them, reducing the cost of future translations.
• Increased Consistency and Quality: As similar translations increase, consistency and quality improve, while costs and turnaround times decrease.

Translation Glossaries

A translation glossary is a list of key terms and phrases specific to your industry or brand, along with their approved translations in the target languages. This ensures consistency in how these terms are translated throughout all your materials. For example, a software company might have a glossary that defines the specific translation for technical terms used in their products.

Benefits of Translation Glossaries:

• Consistency: Ensures adherence to client or industry-specific terms and requirements.
• Efficiency: Especially useful for translating technical documents, legal tenders, and other in-depth texts that require regular repetition of certain words and phrases.
• Brand identify: Defines how brand names are translated (or not), ensuring a consistent global presence.

Style Guides

A style guide outlines your preferred writing style and tone for translated content. It might include guidelines on things like formality, level of detail, and brand voice. For instance, a marketing company might have a style guide specifying a casual and conversational tone for their translated social media content.

Benefit of Style Guides:

• Brand Consistency: Maintains adherence to the client’s product, brands, and in-house style, ensuring messages are consistent across all countries.

The Increasing Importance of Linguistic Assets

Linguistic assets are becoming even more crucial in today’s world due to the rise of new translation and localization technologies.

• Maintaining Consistency Across Technologies: Machine translation (MT) is becoming increasingly sophisticated but can still struggle with nuances and specific terminology. Linguistic assets ensure consistency across projects, whether using human translators or MT.
• Training and Refining MT Engines: Linguistic assets like TMs can train and improve MT engines over time by feeding them with previously translated content and approved translations.
• Human Expertise Remains Crucial: Despite advancements in MT, human translators are essential for complex content, creative tasks, and ensuring cultural appropriateness. Linguistic assets empower translators to work more efficiently by providing pre-approved terminology and style guidelines.
• Efficiency Gains: By leveraging TMs, translators can reuse previously translated segments, reducing overall project time and cost. Glossaries and style guides streamline the translation process, eliminating the need for repetitive questions about terminology preferences.
• Scalability and Adaptability: Linguistic assets can be scaled up or down depending on the size and complexity of your projects and adapted to accommodate new products, services, or marketing campaigns.

Key Benefits of Linguistic Assets

In essence, linguistic assets bridge the evolving world of translation technology and the irreplaceable role of human expertise. They ensure quality, consistency, and efficiency in a setting where both human and machine translation play a role.

By leveraging linguistic assets, language service providers like LanguageLine can deliver higher quality translations consistent with your brand and terminology. They also improve efficiency, allowing translators to complete projects faster and at a lower cost.

Conclusion

Linguistic assets are invaluable tools that enhance the quality and consistency of translations. At LanguageLine, we manage these assets as standard, ensuring your translations are always accurate and on-brand. But is important to note that these assets are your intellectual property, and remain so as they are built over time, refined, and nurtured.

Contact us to discover how our translation and localization strategies can help you unlock new opportunities and expand your global reach.