When we first received all the source files, it took us several hours to evaluate the word count, delivery time and DTP costs.

• The source files are financial statements of a company, 7 files, consisting of all kinds of forms with complex format and densely packed texts of varying sizes. They are like labyrinths filled with squiggles, zigzags and numbers in each branches. Our DTP Department first made an evaluation of the time and cost to make the scanned copies editable. Finally due to the too dense blocks of texts and many illegible Japanese characters, engineers decided to only pre-process the forms and numbers to make them editable in Word files. Afterwards, linguists will be able to translate in the Word files according to the source files.

  It’s indeed a tough task for the linguists to do the translating and editing. And it finally took about 17 days to complete it. Besides the difficulties mentioned above, problem of inconsistency and numeric error is also a tough nut to crack. Since the task was proceeded with in Word files instead of CAT tools, once an inconsistency problem occured in one file, the rest files would need to be checked and revised in the meantime. Without the help of CAT tools, there would inevitably be some missing ones when only checking by human for we could not search and replace in all the files. So we had to check again and again in case of any missings. 

  Here we must say we thanks very much for the linguists involved in this project. They were indeed very professional and patient enough to handle all those from the beginning to the completion. Each time we found some points to be confirmed, they would always try their best to get back as soon as possible. After receipt of the files from the editor, our DTP Department did post-processing to make the format better consistent with that of the source files. Afterwards, we did the last in-house checking and still found some layout problems, translation inconsistencies, errors and omissions, etc. We checked them all with the linguists and made revisions one by one. 

  After all those efforts, we finally worked out the files and delivered them to the client. This task took a long time, during which we got to know the better ways of dealing with some problems. It was a nice try.