This is a long post about something I mentioned in passing on Twitter: using Scrivener for editorial translation projects. User Giovanni posted a screenshot of a French-to-Italian translation project on the screenshots thread, so I’m certainly not the only one who’s had the idea.
For our purposes, let’s define “editorial translation” to cover both literary projects (i.e. novels) and works of a literary nature (i.e. non-fiction works written in a literary style, not reference works).
Most translation projects are non-editorial ones such as software documentation and interfaces, technical manuals, spec sheets, contracts, etc., and they already have Computer-Aided Translation tools that have been built specifically for their needs. THE crucial feature of CAT tools is the ability to recognize and return previously translated bits, so that passages and terms are consistently translated all throughout. (Think of a 15-page manual that’s updated annually, with a few changes here and there, or a hardware store catalogue where the only difference between a hundred entries is the diameter of a tube.) The other crucial feature is a terminology management system, especially for terms where a company has its house jargon, and projects are given to different translators.
In addition, translators who work on such projects generally use Windows.
Editorial translators, on the other hand, work much more like “traditional” writers do, in that most of their focus is devoted to the words itself, and things like terminology management and matching translations are a relatively minor (but by no means inexistent) concern. These are the translators who don’t usually need CAT tools to manage their workflow, and for whom standard word processing apps are adequate.
I work on both sorts of projects, and find Scrivener particularly useful for the editorial ones. (The other ones? Not so much; I actually end up losing time.) Typically, I still end up doing a fair bit of research while working on an editorial project and have 8 tabs open on my browser as I go along; I jot down notes on sections that need to be revised; I refer to glossaries and reference documents sent by the client; and I constantly shift focus away from my main document because I have to refer to my source file repeatedly, either as a PDF, a separate document file, or the hard copy I printed out for annotating and reference. Scrivener solves these problems by putting everything in one place.
And while few non-editorial translators work on a Mac, there’s a much higher proportion of editorial and literary translators who are do.
The point of this post, really, was to give you a heads-up on another potential market for Scrivener. I’d love to see more of my colleagues use it, so that we can swap tips on making the most out of this wonderful app. If there are other translators here, I would most definitely love to hear from you too.
