Handling updates and bleedthrough in Proxy web translation
One key issue with proxy web translation is how you handle updates, and bleedthrough. There is often a gap between making additions or modifications to a website, and the availability of the translation. This may be a question of hours, or days, if the customer requires approval of the estimate before proceeding. The only time there is no gap, is when all the modified or additional text has already been translated and is therefore present in the online Translation Memory. This may occur, for example, if a client has updated a corporate presentation and now wishes to add the updated copy to their website.
There are three options for presenting the modified or new copy during the time gap:
Bleedthrough
Allow the untranslated text to appear until the translation is available. This is the default option – and it’s known as bleedthrough. This may be appropriate for websites with English as the source language – English being the most commonly used language online. However, bleedthrough can deliver an inadequate customer experience which may negatively influence the perception of the brand.
Machine translation
Allow Google Translate to replace the untranslated text, until such time as the professional translation is available. Machine translation can be an adequate, and easy, short term solution. However, it’s worth remembering that MT is not yet completely reliable: Amazon experienced a negative outcome when it entered the Swedish market, and machine translations led to numerous, embarrassing errors on its retail site.
Scheduled updates
Set up a “cache” on the site: this means that the page will appear unchanged, i.e. out of date, until such time as the professional translation is available. The scheduling of updates can be flexible, and for most clients, this is a good solution to the issue. While it is possible to do an immediate update using machine translation and post-editing. It is also possible to do a regular weekly, monthly, or quarterly update to the translated site, therefore the original site is being continually updated, all the time.
