Translating texts without context is a difficult task. Especially in software translations, the texts are often split into many segments, and the meaning can often be lost without context. Fortunately, Lingohub provides multiple ways how to provide context:

If a translator encounters text that is unclear how to translate, they send questions and have to wait for the answers. So context not only helps to improve quality, but it also speeds up the translation process.

Style guide is a great way to define your company's overall tone. With it, you can determine the text type, describe your business and audience, and specify technical rules, e.g., if you prefer formal or informal texts.

Tip: Provide in the style guide the examples of texts to designate what result you expect.

You can add a description to every project. Add the info representing the project: type (mobile game, documentation, etc.), project-specific information (rules, vision, etc.), and all that you think will give translators more reference points.

Additionally to the project information, provide the order description. You can add there the specific data that will be applied only to this order.

Some segments are concise and/or can contain unclear information for translators. Provide segment-specific information to avoid additional questions from translators. E.g., if a segment contains the following text and placeholder: “add %{var}.” In this case, it is tough for the translator to know with what the placeholder %{var} will be replaced. So it would be a good idea to provide an example of the values %{var} can have.

Lingohub will automatically provide information based on the project's term base and quality checks to the translators (even if they are external translators and not using Lingohub directly).

If you have a well-maintained term base, it helps tremendously to improve the quality. It is possible to define untranslated words or terms that should be translated in a specific way. Generally, a good term base (often called a glossary) is precious for consistent and high-quality texts.

Check this article on how to create new entries and how to maintain a term base.

Once the term base is applied to the projects, Lingohub, based on it, automatically generates context information for each text segment for translation orders.

Quality checks are another great way to ensure good quality and provide context. You can define rules (e.g., the maximum or minimum length of a text), and Lingohub will check against these rules. Further, Lingohub will use these rules to create additional information for each text segment within a translation order so that the translators can see what rules they should follow.

Note: Lingohub cannot check the specific rules when an external translator does the translation. But you will see if a quality check rule fails once the text is imported into the system.

Context helps to improve quality and accelerate the translation process. Lingohub gives customers a list of options for providing context best, beginning from general information on your company to text segment-specific information. The best part is that you can reuse this context information for future orders and new languages. Once you set up this information, it stays in the system and helps you in the future.

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