Practical ways to improve the quality of your translations

Corinne McKay (classes@trainingfortranslators.com) is the founder of Training for Translators, and has been a full-time freelancer since 2002. An ATA-certified French to English translator and Colorado court-certified interpreter, she also holds a Master of Conference Interpreting from Glendon College. For more tips and insights, join the Training for Translators mailing list!

Translation: hot right now? 

That sounds like an odd way to put it, but…my translation work has been stable (not up, not down) for the past two years or so, until this past quarter (Q1 of 2025) when, all of a sudden, I made $10,000 more from translation than in the first quarter of 2024. This was thanks to a couple of large projects from my good direct clients. When I posted this on LinkedIn, a couple of people chimed in to say that they’ve had similar results in the past few months (and a couple of people reported even more dramatic increases). I’m not sure if this is trend, but it’s an interesting data point: my interpreting work is stable, teaching/writing/consulting is stable, and translation is, for the moment at least, way up. 

Improving our translation quality 

If you want the TLDR version, here are my top strategies for improving the quality of your translations:

• Read a lot of well-written documents in your target language, and try to find things that are as similar as possible to what you translate. Pay attention to the sentence structure, paragraph structure, tone, register, terminology, everything! 
• Decide whether file conversion and translation memory are time-savers or time-wasters 
• Know what makes a translation sound like a translation, particularly between your specific source and target languages 
• If you translate into Microsoft Word, learn its features that can help you translate faster and better 
• Have a robust process for when you have to proofread your own work (even if it then goes to a secondary editor)

Let’s look at little deeper!

Technology: time-saver, or time-waster?

Whenever you’re going to use a technology tool, whether it’s a relatively low-tech thing like converting from PDF to Word, or something higher-tech like TM or MT, you want to make sure that it’s saving you time, improving the quality of your work, or both. 

• A PDF to Word conversion (I use iLovePDF for this) can save you a lot of time if you end up with a “clean” Word document, but it can be worse than starting from scratch, if you end up with a Word document that’s full of weird text boxes and nonsense characters (stop me if this sounds familiar).
• Personally, I hate editing bad translations; I’d rather start from scratch. For this reason, I don’t edit fuzzy matches when I use translation memory, and I never use a machine translation/AI-generated translation as a starting point. I also have confidentiality concerns about online tools; I have the paid version of ChatGPT, I have the “do not use my data to improve the model for other people” option checked, and I still never put anything confidential (even a client’s name) into it, because I’m not convinced that it’s actually not storing or sharing my data. This may be a personal paranoia, but I’m sticking with it. 
• And yet, these tools can be huge time-savers. I use Trados, and I find that it saves a lot of time if I have a good-quality PDF with complicated formatting, because it reproduces that formatting in the translation. I can generally translate about 10% faster in a TM tool even if the document isn’t repetitive, but the TM tool makes it a lot harder to rearrange text and avoid the “chunky” feeling of translate one segment at a time. 

A translation that sounds like a translation 

Lots of things make a translation sound like a translation. Some are amorphous (it’s just not the way a native speaker would write), and some can be identified. For example, I translate from French to English, and it’s obvious that:

• French-language writers love their passive voice. Your English translation should almost always be in active voice. 
• They also love a reallllly long sentence. U.S. English prefers shorter, snappier sentences. 
• And the fact that French uses “of the” rather than a simpler possessive construction, leads to the temptation to say “the profits of the company” rather than “the company’s profits.” This stands out as “non-native-sounding” when you read an entire document full of, “of the.” 

As translators, I think we’re also often reluctant to deviate too much from the source text. For example, I recently used the expression “on the flip side” in a translation (it fit the register of the document!), and the editor commented that they’d never seen that expression used in a translation: everyone says “on the other hand,” or “on the contrary.” It’s OK to live a little, as long as your translation mirrors the tone and register of the original. 

This can be a good use of an AI tool; I use ChatGPT a lot for rewriting: “Make this at least 10% shorter while maintaining the core message and tone.” 

Learn some Microsoft Word advanced features

Actually, I’m not sure if these are advanced features or not; maybe you know them already! But here are my favorites: 

• Add your own autocompletes. For example, I recently translated a document that repeated the name of the French town “Le Coudray-Montceaux” about 20 times. Rather than retyping this and checking the spelling every time, I created an autocomplete so that I could type “LCM” and Word would expand it into the full name of the town. Find this under File>Options>Proofing>AutoCorrect Options>Replace. Type your shortcut in the Replace box, and the full text in the With box. 
• Shift+F3 to toggle the case of your highlighted text, from all lowercase to Initial Caps to ALL CAPS 
• Control+Backspace to delete the previous word (rather than tapping Backspace 10 times to delete one letter at a time) 
• Tab leaders: Thank you to my friend and colleague Andie Ho for this! If you’ve ever tried to fill a line with dots or dashes (this happens a lot in official documents), don’t do it manually! Set a tab leader (Paragraph menu>Tabs) so that you set a tab stop in the appropriate location (for example six inches for the right-hand margin), then set the “fill with” character (dots, dashes, or a solid line), and when you press Tab, it will automatically fill the line, and automatically adjust the fill if you later change the text that precedes it. 
• Dictation: The Dictate feature in Microsoft Word is helpful, even if you don’t generally dictate your translations. I use it for things that are tedious to type, like long lists of numbers in official document translations. 

Finally, a few proofreading tips

I struggle with editing because I read too fast. My not-so-secret weapon is text to speech: having the computer read my translation out loud while I visually read the source document.  I find it hugely helpful with:

• Things that are boring or meaningless but that have to be perfect (a series of numbers) 
• Missing words that I would miss if I were reading them (because your brain fills in what’s not there!)
• Words that look visually similar but sound really different (state/slate)
• Opposites that are only one letter different (employer/employee) 

Other proofreading techniques that you might find helpful:

• Print the translation (but then you have to transfer the corrections to the screen version without introducing new errors)
• Change the font to something like hot-pink Comic Sans so that it looks totally different 
• Make the document into a PDF so that it looks different from the original (I sometimes do this when I’m traveling: put a PDF of the document on my iPad and input the changes on my laptop)
• Use Dark Mode to set a dark background with white type

And most importantly, give yourself as much time as possible between the translation and the proofreading!

I hope these tips are helpful; have a great week!

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