Example of Transcription...

Hi everyone,

Here are some problems that we have encountered when we were translating your document, and how we solved them :

• PART 2 – Sign Up :
  In the French version of Google Docs, the option “Set Google as my default homepage” does not appear, so we didn't translate the sentence about the default homepage since it will not appear on the screen capture of the French version and we don't want to confuse the reader.
  
  
• PART 3 – Creating a New Document etc. :
  The document says “We'll start by following a Document”, but this is actually the only thing that is mentioned in this manual, you don't explain how to create a Spreadsheet or a Presentation etc. So we dropped the word “start” in the French version.
  
  
• PART 4 – Rename a Document etc. :
  The title “Rename a Document, Spreadsheet, or Presentation” appears twice : first as the title, then as a subtitle. We deleted the subtitle and started directly by the action to perform.
  
  
• By the way, it would be probably better in your English version to stick to one verb form: title 3 says “creatING” while title 4 says “renamE”.
  
  
• Same thing for “your document” and “a document”. We decided to translate by “your document” throughout the text, as we heard in our Technical Writing class that it was better to be consistent in this kind of document.
  
  
• Finally, there is a problem with the figure numbers : there are two figures 11 and two figures 12 in your document.

We are done with the translation now, we just need to add the French pictures to our text. Thanks for your replies Shehani and Nick!

Elaine.



So this came from the French team. It's a shame they ended up having more work to do than we anticipated, as we tried to make it as easy for them as possible. If this were to happen again in the future, it may have been better to choose pictures and captions that would not have to be translated so much. This would make it easier to translate instructional documents.