Thread: Back Translation

Oh, okay. That makes sense. Thanks!

It's more common than what you think :-)

After the back translation, we can perform a Reconciliation. During reconciliation, source material is compared with the back translation to look for problems where the meaning is confusing or slightly off in meaning. Under reconciliation, edits and adjustments are made as needed to optimize the final output.

I see. Now is the reconciliation performed by the same team that did the translation or the back translation? Or does it have to be completed by a new team that didn't do either of these steps?

I suppose it is a much easier and faster process to have one language service provider perform all the steps in the forward translation, back translation and reconciliation process.

I was just thinking perhaps there is an issue with using the same team to check their own work. It seems like a conflict of interest for them to point out their own errores, and that's assuming that they can even catch them.

Yes, they can be biased, but it also happens that a translation has no important errors. And as you can see, this is a heavy process. There are simpler methods to get a good translation.

We can learn a lot from, for example, from a healthcare organization that contacts you because they had relied on a competitive translator who accidentally mistranslated a word, which eventually cost them their entire research project and millions of dollars. One word mistranslated can have serious consequences.

But wouldn't you both agree that the back translation should be preformed by different translators that did the translation? It doesn't seem to make sense to have the same team that did the translations make the back translation, or am I missing something?