My team was assigned to work with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints’ Localization department. The majority of our internship was spent on creating a Translation Review Guide (TRG) for each General Conference Talk from October 1997. To summarize what a TRG is, it is essentially a annotated General Conference talk so a translator has all the context and explanations needed to complete a translation. Towards the end, The Church changed their translation process to create Style Guides for each Language instead of creating individual guides for every single translation request. These style guides would be intended for Translation companies that do not have a background in The Church. Our team then worked on creating a Spanish Style Guide as a prototype for future guides.
I enjoyed my overall experience with these projects. In previous classes, I have had to annotate poems and short stories but usually it was only for old words that people would not know today. When creating TRGs, it pushed me to write explanations that I did not think of before because they were terms or figurative language I never had to explain. When my group switched over to creating the Spanish Style Guide, it was trying to combine everything that we had learned from creating TRGs. I did not speak Spanish so I could not contribute regarding conjugations, noun classes, and so forth. Another team member did not speak Spanish so we began building a reference library. We used a list of Church terms the Church had already put together and we connected these terms to Church materials already available (True to the Faith, Preach my Gospel, etc.) to build a reference table of contents.
Doing this localization internship helped me to open my understanding of marketing to a whole new level. It helped me to realize how critical it is for the context of materials to transfer into other languages. This internship has also sparked a desire to work in this field and I actually got a job working on a localization marketing team. My experience with the style guide is helping me to establish the company’s process for translation to ensure the quality of our materials are matching the original English material.
Learn more about HCOLL494, visit
https://marriottschool.byu.edu/oci/students/projects/
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