Preparing Technical Documents for Translation

Most translation problems are baked in before a translator ever opens the file. When you prepare documents for translation properly, you are deciding in advance how many questions will interrupt your engineers, how many hours of reformatting you will pay for, and whether the German edition of your manual will still fit inside its page frames.

Fifteen years of technical projects have taught us that the difference between a smooth handoff and a painful one rarely comes down to the translator. It comes down to what arrived in the kickoff email. This guide collects the preparation habits that matter, in the order they matter, for documentation managers, engineers, and anyone who buys translation for manuals, procedures, datasheets, or drawings.

Decide what actually needs translating

Before file hygiene, settle the scope. Documentation sets grow by accretion, and plenty of them carry material no one in the target market will ever read: superseded appendices, an installation chapter for a configuration you stopped selling in 2021, internal approval pages, a spare parts list that is nothing but part numbers and dimensions.

Walk the set once and sort it into three piles. Documents that must be translated because a regulator, a contract, or an operator's safety depends on it. Documents that pay for themselves by cutting support calls. Documents that can stay in English because the audience is a bilingual engineering team who would rather have the original. The middle pile is where the budget conversation belongs, and it deserves fifteen minutes with whoever owns the market rather than a blanket instruction to translate everything.

Two practical notes on scope. Tables holding only part codes, dimensions, and unit symbols usually need no translation beyond their headers, and pulling them out of the count is a legitimate saving a vendor should point out without being asked. And if a large manual has to ship in phases, split it at chapter boundaries rather than page counts, so no translator inherits half a procedure and no reviser has to guess what came before.

Freeze the source before anything else

A moving source document is the single most expensive habit in technical translation. Every engineering change issued mid-project ripples through the target text: the changed sentences must be re-translated, the reviser must re-check them, and if layout has started, the desktop publisher must rework pages that were already final. Three small revisions to a 60-page manual can add a week to a three-week project.

The fix is version discipline, and it costs nothing. Pick one release of the document, label it with a version number and a date, and declare it the translation source. If changes are unavoidable, batch them: collect edits into a single tracked revision and hand them over once, with the changed passages marked. Your translation memory will absorb the update cleanly, and you will pay only for the sentences that actually changed.

Write source text that survives translation

Translators reproduce what the source says, including its ambiguities. Text written with translation in mind produces better target documents in every language at once, which makes this the highest-yield edit you can make. Four habits carry most of the weight:

• Keep sentences short. Aim under 25 words. A 60-word sentence with three subordinate clauses forces the translator to guess which clause modifies which, and different languages will resolve the guess differently.
• One concept, one term. If the same part is a "screen" on page 4, a "display" on page 12, and a "monitor" in the spare parts list, three different target terms may appear, and your service techs will wonder whether they are three different parts.
• Drop idioms, humor, and cultural references. A joke about baseball in a maintenance warning does nothing in Korean except generate a query.
• Untangle noun stacks. "Hydraulic pump pressure relief valve seat" can be parsed several ways. Add a preposition or split the phrase.

Teams that write large volumes of procedures sometimes adopt a controlled authoring standard such as ASD-STE100 (Simplified Technical English). You do not need to go that far to see gains. A one-page writing rule sheet applied by your authors will do most of the work.

Source habit	Why it hurts in translation	Better
"It should be checked regularly."	Unclear subject: the seal? the level? the whole assembly?	"Check the oil level every 200 hours."
Mixed terms: e-stop, emergency stop, kill switch	Each variant may get its own target term	Pick one term and hold it everywhere
"Roughly a quart or so"	Vague quantity plus a unit the target market may not use	"0.9 L (1 qt)"
Instructions buried in dense paragraphs	Steps get reordered or merged in the target text	Numbered steps, one action each

Get the files themselves in order

The words are only half the handoff. The container they arrive in determines how much manual labor sits between translation and delivery.

Send editable sources, never a PDF export of them. A PDF is a picture of a document; recreating its structure adds hours of preparation and introduces errors that were never in your original. If the manual was written in Word, send the DOCX. If it was laid out in InDesign, export an IDML package with links and fonts. Our guide to file formats for technical translation covers what to send for every authoring tool, including FrameMaker, DITA, and software resource files.

Then look inside the files:

• Use real styles. Headings built with paragraph styles survive translation and regenerate the table of contents automatically. Headings faked with bold and font-size changes do neither.
• Pull text out of images. Callouts burned into screenshots and photos cannot be translated without image editing. Keep labels in text layers, or supply the label text in a separate table.
• Check embedded objects. Excel tables pasted into Word as pictures, charts with hard-coded captions, and OLE objects all hide translatable text.
• Ship the fonts and links. An InDesign package without its fonts guarantees a round trip of emails before layout can even start.

Engineering drawings deserve a special mention. DWG title blocks, block attributes, and dimension notes are translatable, but only if we receive the native file rather than a plotted PDF. Flag any drawing numbers or standard references that must stay untouched.

Prepare the graphics, not only the words

Figures carry more instruction than most authors realize, and they are where preparation shortcuts show up most visibly in the delivered file.

Screenshots are the usual sticking point. If the product interface is being localized in the same program, target screenshots have to be recaptured from the translated build, and somebody has to schedule that against the software release. If the interface stays in English, say so at handoff and decide whether translated callouts will repeat the English label in parentheses. Settling this question early costs one email; settling it during layout costs a round of rework in every language.

For diagrams, send the editable version: the Visio drawing, the Illustrator file, the CAD export, rather than the flattened PNG that was pasted into Word four years ago. Where the editable original is genuinely lost, supply a numbered figure with a separate legend table so labels can be translated as text and placed beside the image instead of inside it. Photographs of equipment showing English signage or nameplates need a decision too: replace the photo, caption it, or leave it and explain why.

Units inside figures deserve a look before handoff. A dimension called out in inches on a drawing may need a metric equivalent for the target market, and converting it is an engineering decision rather than a translation one. Tell us which values are nominal designations that must stay as written, such as a 1/2-inch NPT thread, and which are measurements that should be converted.

Plan for text expansion

Translated text is rarely the same length as the source. English into German typically grows 25 to 35 percent; French and Spanish grow 15 to 25 percent; Chinese usually shrinks in character count but needs more vertical space per line. If your source layout is packed edge to edge, something has to give.

Where expansion bites hardest: tables with fixed column widths, warning labels sized to the English string, software buttons, drawing title blocks, and any text frame in InDesign set to exact dimensions. Leave 30 percent of slack in these elements when you design, or tell us which elements are fixed so our desktop publishing team can compensate with type size and line breaks instead of improvising. For software strings, state the character limit per string in the handoff file; retrofitting limits after translation means re-translating half the interface.

Hand over context and everything that already exists

A translator who knows what the product is, who reads the document, and what happened on previous projects makes better decisions on every page. None of this takes long to assemble:

• Two or three sentences on the product and the document's audience. A procedure read by operators on a plant floor is worded differently from one read by design engineers.
• The target market and language variant: Spanish for Mexico or for Spain, French for Canada or for France, Portuguese for Brazil. These are real decisions with regulatory consequences, not stylistic details.
• Any approved glossary or term list, even a rough Excel sheet. If none exists, say so; building one is a service worth its own discussion, and our terminology management guide explains how it works.
• Previous translations you were happy with, and any you were not. Both are equally instructive.
• Items that must never be translated: product names, part numbers, signal names, standard designations.
• One named contact who can answer translator questions within a business day.

All of this gets confirmed at kickoff. The step-by-step description of our process shows exactly where your reference material enters the workflow and who uses it.

A 12-point checklist before you send files for translation

Run through this list the day before handoff. Ten minutes here routinely saves days later.

1. Source content frozen, labeled with a version number and date.
2. Editable native files located for every document, including drawings.
3. Paragraph and character styles applied consistently; no faked headings.
4. Text extracted from screenshots and images, or label tables supplied.
5. Embedded spreadsheets, charts, and OLE objects checked for hidden text.
6. Fonts and linked graphics packaged with layout files.
7. Target language variants confirmed for each market.
8. Audience and purpose stated in a sentence or two.
9. Glossaries, previous translations, and reference documents gathered.
10. Do-not-translate items flagged: names, part numbers, code strings.
11. Layouts reviewed for expansion room, or fixed elements identified.
12. One contact named for translator queries, with response expectations.

What good preparation is worth

We will not pretend to give you a universal percentage; savings depend on how far your current handoffs are from the list above. But the mechanics are predictable. Clean files quote faster because word counts are exact on the first pass. Stable sources avoid paid rework. Consistent terminology raises translation memory match rates on every future project, so each manual costs less than the one before it. And a document that needed two hours of layout repair instead of two days simply comes back sooner.

The pattern we see across clients is that the second project is where preparation pays visibly: the glossary exists, the memory is seeded, and the authors have adjusted a few habits. If you want a concrete number for a specific document set, send us the files as they are and we will tell you, line by line, what preparation would change in the price.