A multilingual experience

by Gill McConnell, Design Manager

The successful first volume in the CD series "Interactive Learning in Dermatology" authored by Professor R E W Halliwell and Dr D H Lloyd (shown below) and sponsored by Virbac has now been translated from English into French and Spanish. The French version is published, and the trilingual version is going through final checks.

This sounds straightforward, but was fraught with difficulties. When Emma and I designed the first CD, we were not thinking about translation. To make use of the (then) new features of Authorware of hypertext links and searches, we embedded the text within the program. Corrections to the text were made within the programs. This meant that to ensure accuracy, all the text had to be extracted from the displays before translation by specialist medical translators in France and Spain. Because the CD contains hours of material with many pop-ups and adaptive feedback, inevitably some text was missed which was sent off with alarming regularity to the besieged translators, who fortunately were always prompt and courteous with their replies.

Pasting the text back into the programs revealed the predictable, and much documented problem of the greater length of French and Spanish phrases – the ratio to English turned out to be about 3:2. This extra space requirement had not been allowed for in the original design, and on some screens, it was very difficult to accommodate the extra text.

Deadlines were tight for completion of the translated CDs, and difficulties continued. Some aspects of the French translation were called into question, and many alterations were required, the text eventually being checked, to my relief, by a French vet. However good the translators are, this sort of checking is essential, and at least as much time must be allowed for a translated version as for the original.

Delivery dates were high in our minds, and curiously, the most stressful aspect of the production was our dealings with replicators. They lost the master, they misprinted the covers, they sent the wrong numbers, they missed the delivery date …. Understandably, we have now changed our replicators!

Happily, we are now in a much better position to estimate realistic time scales and to monitor progress than we were with our first foray into translation. We also have colleagues from the European Socrates program in Alfort and Barçelona who will I’m sure contribute greatly to future trilingual productions, the first of which will be a CD-ROM illustrating Canine Pyoderma in the dog.