Why are Formatting Issues Seen as Translation Mistakes
Translation Mistakes
It is a general rule of the world that new things replace the old things every few decades or sometimes after a century. We keep progressing and reaching for better things. But if we don’t update everything else with each new invention, we will not be able to keep up with the changing trends. Some people fear change and think that if all the old things got replaced by new things, there will be nothing good left in life. But that is not true. We need to take care of old things that are a part of our culture and history but holding on to everything just because we don’t want change is a stupid thing to do.
Newspapers are still around for sure but most of us turn to the digital world to get the news. Not only is it a quicker way to learn about latest happenings all around the world, but also don’t charge you for a subscription, other than what you are already paying for your internet. Twitter is the best source of news in today’s world where journalists and news agencies turn to as soon as they have something to share. Every time something happens in one part of the world, it reaches everywhere in record time thanks to the internet.
But there is still plenty of data available on paper that is hard to go through without the help of a computer. Each time you have to search something on a computer, you can press Ctrl+F, type the word you want to locate, and see the results instantly. But you can’t do that on a physical book or newspaper. Police records are another example where searching for things when you are racing against time shouldn’t take as long as it does when every file is not digitized.
Once everyone understood the importance of digitizing text, the process picked up speed. Today, a lot of old books, documents, and records have been converted into digital text using different techniques. But whether it is the transfer of information from paper to computer or from one language into another, there are a lot of problems that hinder the smooth process of conversion.
Formatting Issues and Why are the Considered Translation Mistakes?
Each language has its own alphabets which means each will take different space when writing the same sentence on a piece of paper or on a digital file. There are a lot of multilingual websites on the internet that are designed for a wide range of audience. But the process of making them understandable for all of those people is not an easy one. Translating websites that have already been published involves a lot of complications. Formatting issues occur more frequently than one would think. However, many times these issues are seen as translation mistakes. A good translator is someone who knows how to translate a text on a website to fit the page. They keep sentences brief and follow the format of the original document. A lot of time this works and this is why some people think that if there are formatting issues, they must be caused by the translator.
Top 10 Problems with Conversion of Text:
There are many problems that one might face when converting digital text and satisfying clients almost feels impossible due to them. Here are the top ten problems with conversion of text that when understood and solved, can make the process a lot easier:
- Formatting Issues:
Every document has a different format and when it is converted into a digital form or another language, the format will get affected no matter how much you try to prevent it. This is why some people prefer to keep the old documents as they are.
- Space Problems:
When translating text, the new language might require more space than the old one but if you have a limited space on the page, that can be a problem.
- OCR Issues:
OCR or optical character recognition is a software designed to pick written words and convert them into digital text. But it has limitations, a lot of them. It cannot read cursive writing or different languages which is why it isn’t very helpful in digitization of old documents.
- Language Issues:
Translation itself has limitations when it comes to old documents. Although it won’t stop the process of conversion, it will slow it down because old languages don’t have a lot of translator.
- Client Satisfaction:
Clients have various demands when they require conversion of text into another language. This can also slow down the process.
- Cultural Values:
In order to do translation accurately, the local culture also has to be kept in mind. Which makes conversion a lot more complicated.
Data available for digitization is huge in volume and most of it can’t be handled by machines due to its poor quality. But human resources are not always enough for steady conversion.
- PDF Images:
Sometimes conversion has to be carried out of PDF documents but when they have text behind the images too, the process of digitizing them becomes lengthy and tiring.
- Complex Pages:
If one or more of your PDF file’s pages contain too many vectors, that can also cause a problem with conversion.
- Spelling Errors:
Often two words that look similar to another word are replaced with that word when machines are used for conversion. In huge texts, this problem can be very difficult to fix.
Human translators and conversion experts can reduce the problems with digitization and formatting without translation mistakes and should always be preferred over software and online tools.
