Why do we need translation archives?

The Internet has revolutionized research capabilities in a just few short years. TTN puts this technology to full use in managing its translation orders.

Correctly kept translation archives represent the translators’ valuable working capital. The terminology built up within a company and its specific formulations which shape the company’s culture, marketing and production must be managed and made available.

All orders flowing through TTN are automatically indexed. A search machine immediately finds blocks of texts which have already been translated. Translators and proof-readers surf through client’s files and copy existing text elements from several text windows. Automatic archives accumulate the translation know-how and more accurate and elegant formulations are added with each new entry.

Communicating with another language group sometimes takes years to learn and needs refining all the time. Successful quotations, advertising slogans which truly hit the mark, and legally safe contract elements provide the raw material for acceptance in the foreign language marketplace. A company’s foreign language communications are at a standstill without reliable translation archives. The same mistakes and misunderstandings are repeated again and again, mutual understanding is enormously difficult.

Company Archives and Private Archives

The translation orders are kept in private archives and in one or several company archives. Your private archives only contain orders that were handled through your account. The company archives contain all orders from your company or department. In the company archives you can also see your colleagues and employees’ translation orders, and searches cover all documents belonging to a particular user group. The company archives are above all useful for terminological searches. Manuals and brochures ought to consistently have the same titles and their contents ought to be immediately retrievable in all languages.

The company archives are strictly confidential and off-limits to non-authorized persons. Individual accounts identify themselves to the system by means their username and password. Translation accounts can only be combined in a group by the Translation Manager. In order to form such a group, the Translation Manager asks each user to provide a signed access authorization.

Operation of the Translation Archive

After selecting the archive a mask appears on the screen with information on the number of orders held in a given archive.

Outstanding orders

The "outstanding orders" option displays a list of all current translation orders, regardless of how you placed the order. Orders received by fax and post are also listed.

You can monitor all production stages direct on the screen. Failures and delays are immediately detected by the system, taken up by the translation manager and corrected. Progress is displayed with the use of symbols. Each order has an overall status and a status for each file. The overall status changes when all files from one order reach the same file status.

All orders run through the following production stages:

Processing status	Symbol	Meaning
New		The order has not yet been passed to the translators.
Queue		The order has been passed on to the translator. The translator has not started his work.
In progress		The translator is working on the translation.
Proofread		The translator has translated the file and is it being checked by the editor.
Quality control		The translation manager makes a final check. He compares various expressions and checks the layout.
Ready		The translation has been sent to the client.

The names of the translators also appear on the list as soon as the translation manager has allocated the orders to the production team. The database entry of the respective translator with the relevant professional information will appear when you click on a name. In this way, you can be assured that only qualified translators with college or university education are engaged on your work. 

Completed translations

The "Show X orders" option lists all translations which have already been delivered. Orders appear in date order. The last order is always at the top of the list.

Falls If you have mislaid a translation, click at the appropriate language. The translation will now appear in the HTML format. Click at "Download" to transfer the file in its original format to your computer.