We finally have the files delivered within 9 days and gained good feedback from our client.
At the early stage when we received this inquiry, we provided a rate based on an estimated character count – 30,000 because all the source files are scanned copies with complex layout and they contain Japanese and English text as well.
When the order was finally confirmed, we were given a rather short delivery time – 6 working days. While after pre-processing, the character count turned out to be much more than what we quoted to the client. It was not a good time to revise since we already received PO. We had to move on without hesitation due to the urgent deadline.
And just because the urgent deadline, we assigned this job to 3 linguists to do the translation and one linguist to do the editing to ensure consistency of translations. The files are about the qualification documents, inpsection reports, operation process, machines and equipment, etc. of a pharmaceutical factory so we searched in our resource pool and selected the most appropriate linguists who are rich in knowledge of medical & healthcare and mechanism, meanwhile are also specialized in translating certificate and patent.
Since some pages contain English and Japanese text while only the Japanese parts are what we should translate. We had to take time to search among the hundreds of pages and highlighted the Japanese text. Afterwards, our DTP Department did the pre-processing to these highlighted parts and remained the English parts unchanged. Our engineers did make every effort to keep the layout of the editable files nearly the same with that of the source files, which was a good start and helped a lot for the following translating and editing jobs.
The project moved on smoothly and the linguists delivered in batches and accordingly we did in-house checking in batches as well. Because the files contain large quantities of numbers and inevitably there occurred some errors for some numbers after pre-processing. It took much time to check and revise for this part.
After all those, we run QA through Xbench and ask the linguists made revision according to the QA reports. This project also required a job which was inserting the pages back to the PDF file in order for we extracted the pages to be translated from the hundreds of source files to do the job. Since there was no page information so the marking job at the early stage helped a lot.

