Tips and best practices for reviewing your own content
You just have finished a task. Congratulations!
However, you must review it before you complete it! Below you can find some tips and best practices on how to do it.
Before you even start
If the deadline allows, take a break. It’s best to plan the review for later in the day. This will give you a ‘fresh’ perspective and help to distance yourself from the text.
You should also
- Reread the project instructions.
- Consult project materials, partner references, and language specific style guides.
- Consult the glossaries and term bases linked to the project. Use them to list important terms to keep an extra eye on.
- If there are more people collaborating on your project, check if they left any comments on their chunks of work.
- Check the project forum thread too. It might include comments or questions that could help you with the review process.
- If you’ve ever received peer feedback, incorporate it in your review.
Do you think you need more context? It’s a good time to ask for it! Reach out to your project officer.
During the review
You are ready to dive in. Besides correcting a typo or two, erasing any extra whitespaces or double-checking punctuation, review your text for:
1. Accuracy
You want to make sure the source meaning is represented correctly in the target language
- pay special attention to recurring key words or concepts,
- get to know your ‘false friends’ and look for them in your work.
To guide you through the review, check how we assess Accuracy.
2. Terminology
Check the glossaries and term bases
- make sure they are always respected,
- confirm that terms are correctly applied in their context, and
- check if key terms are consistently translated.
It’s worth also consulting how we assess Terminology.
3. Readability
The text should flow naturally. If the format allows it, it’s best to download it from the translation tool and do a monolingual read
(i) open your task in the Phrase TMS editor
(ii) on the top pane go to Document>Preview translation
As a rule of thumb, if you need to reread a sentence, it’s worth simplifying it
- think about a simpler word order, sentence structure or grammar,
- if needed, divide the text into smaller sentences.
Pay attention to
- unnecessary repetitions,
- grammar structure in lists,
- tones or registers in the same context,
- use of translation memories (TMs) in the context of the whole text.
4. Style
Think about the ‘big picture’. The style should give the target audience the same meaning and feeling that the source text gives its readers
- check if the message is coherent,
- verify if the target audience can relate to your content,
- follow partner style guides, if there are any.
You might want to consult how we assess Style.
5. Consistency
Check your content for consistency and add any changes consistently during the review
- use the search pane and filter search inside of Phrase TMS,
- remember to cover different variants of words in your search.
6. Design
We want to ensure the document has no formatting defects. For more details on what we look for, consult how we assess Design.
Important note: some design issues are outside of your control, as the projects often go through desktop publishing (DTP) processing before delivery. If you are not sure, consult your project officer.
Completing the task
Do a final reading of your target text without reading the source text.
If you work in the Phrase TMS environment, always run the QA check before delivery. It’s even worth to re-run the QA check one or two times, to make sure all of the issues have been addressed.
You can now complete the task!
In the near future you might receive questions or insights about your task. Engage with our staff. This will help us in improving our quality and processes.
Last but not least, we wanted to thank you for your involvement! We value your work and are grateful that you volunteer with us.