Insights

What does TEP stand for?

One of the most notorious effects of the globalisation process is the internationalisation of the companies across the world. Business relationships have spread over firms from different countries and, then, communication and understanding needs have disrupted as crucial ones.

As a result of the growing international relations among firms in different countries, the translation and localisation industry is more and more important in order to improve clarity and accuracy in the communication process. 

According to several sources, the localisation sector is the industry dedicated to enabling and facilitating multilingual communication in both oral and written cases. Nevertheless, how this industry actually works?

Nowadays, most of the service language providers are following the TEP process (Translation, Editing and Proofreading) which is an important approach to translating so as to ensure top-quality work and to avoid any potential changes of the overall sense of the work or misunderstandings. As this industry is client-oriented, this process would be required in most cases.

The TEP process comprises 3 different steps for having the high-quality work completed: translation, editing and, last but not least, proofreading. These steps are completed by a team of specialised linguists, each one supervises one out of the 3 stages.

What about the translation stage?

Translation is the first step in the TEP process and it is of upmost importance as it implies the analysis of the case and the conversion of the work from source language to target language. It is highly recommended that the linguist working on the case is a native speaker and that he/she has the relevant experience and knowledge about the matter of the work they are translating. As a golden rule, Transladiem Ltd only uses native speaker who translate into their mother tongue.

Moreover, with the ultimate objective of time and cost efficiency, the linguist in charge of the translation process is also helped by glossary and transaltion memory that could guide them along the work.

What is it going on during the editing stage?

After the translation stage, another expert-on-the-field linguist is responsible for removing all kind of errors and adapting the text to the format and the structure of the final document. This process is known as editing stage, it is also of upmost importance and its goal varies depending on the type of translation done:

• Direct translation: word-by-word translation, in the case of technical and high-specialisation documents.
• Localisation: translation regarding the idiosyncratic context.
• Transcreation: translation regarding the main meaning of the text’s message.

What is it going on during the proofreading stage?

Once the final document is translated and edited, a final exhaustive review has to be done to ensure that the terminology, translation, structure and format of the document are in shape to be delivered to the client.

In the proofreading stage, a senior translator is in charge of reviewing all the final shape and quality of the work before the delivery. He/she is compulsorily a native speaker and he/she has a very deep knowledge about the terminology (keywords) of the matter of the work.

Finally, the TEP process is a translation standard that should be followed by all the companies in this sector as its ultimate objective is to ensure top-quality service for the customers, avoiding grammatical, terminological and formatting errors.