I also wanted to talk about an issue I had about this translation : how to translate the title.

The English title is : How to tune alpine skis

It is actually pretty clear; the title introduces a question "How to..." while the document will "answer" this question. This kind of subject title phrasing is pretty common in English.

However, that's not quite the case in french. While the litteral translation of the title would be "Comment entretenir des skis alpins" it sounds rather off.
I hesitated a lot : that was only my personal impression, and changing the syntax of the title may be more significant than I imagined. Aren't we changing the whole idea of the text if we change the title?

I had two other ideas :
Entretenir ses skis  : we dropped the "question" aspect. This title is short and go to the essential, but I felt as if it became really "cold" comparing to the English version. In my opinion, this "asking a question" title sounds more gentle, more appealing than this translation.

Conseils pour l'entretien de vos skis : this time, we completely changed the title's, but I think it sounds much gentler, much more close to the original. Of course, this translation is not perfect (it's really more about true instructions than "advices") but I think it sounds better.


On another hand, I used "ski" instead of "alpine ski" because "ski alpin" is mostly used as a sport name, not as a material name in french. There is "skis" for regular skiing on the slopes and "cross-country skis". But here, "alpine skis" is really about regular skiing.

A few days ago, I received an email from my teacher :
 

"Chers étudiants,

j'ai reçu un message de mon ami Bruce Maylath. La partie figurant ci-dessous vous concernait.

The last suggestion listed came after the videoconference ended as the last students were leaving the TV studio. The students who wrote instructions for assembling a bicycle and for tuning alpine skis mentioned that they never received any questions from their translation partners. When they asked their partners why, the translators said that they were able to find answers to their questions by asking friends in France who are knowledgeable about bikes or skis. While it’s certainly understandable that asking target-language friends would be easier and more convenient than it would be to write an e-mail in the source language to the source-language author, such an approach undermines the value of the collaborative project. It seems that while some writers are slow to answer questions, some translators are reluctant to send questions. There certainly is a high degree of individual variability among the students who populate our courses.

Je serais très intéressée par votre réponse à cette question. Je veux bien un retour de votre part par courriel à m'adresser en anglais. Je veux bien aussi que vous parliez de ce sujet dans vos carnets de bord. Pourquoi n'aviez vous pas de questions à poser à votre partenaires américains, de quel ordre étaient les questions posées à vos experts, qui étaient vos experts ? Bien sûr tout ceci sert nos recherches et je ne veux en rien vous pointer du doigt.

Bien cordialement, 
Patricia Minacori "


Thinking back on it all, it is true that I didn't ask that much questions to Scott. I mostly asked him if he could add some images, and if he could tell me some file guide well-known brands, and to explain to me this term overall. I didn't really had questions about what he wrote in itself, for I mostly understood his english document. However, because of that, it's likely that it could be misunderstood as not being interested in communicating or being reluctant to ask questions. So I explained myself :

"Madame Minacori,

Thank you for your email. I'll try to answer your question as clearly
as possible.
My paternal family has been living in Haute-Savoie for several
generations and is deeply bound to the alpine world, so kids of the
family are often taught about alpine sports, such as mountaineering or
skiing. Even though I'm not familiar with the specific vocabulary of ski
tuning, I didn't have any problem visualizing the informations written
in the instructions guide. Thus I didn't have any specific questions
about the global understanding of the english text (even though I asked
my coworker several advices to understand the material name "file
guide", which I struggled to picture).

My expert was my father. Since he has been skiing his whole life, he
knew about the specific vocabulary, especially when it comes to the the
different parts of the alpine ski. I also asked him to reread my
document, in order to tell me if he agreed with the terms I used.

There is also the fact that I like to work on my projects as soon as I
can, so that I don't have to rush it the few days before the deadline.
Since I understood most of the instructions guide, I didn't want to
bother Scott with questions I knew I could answer by myself if I looked
hard enough into it. Moreover, since most of my problems were about the
french terms in themselves, and not about the english document itself,
there wasn't much Scott could do, so I really didn't want to bother him
with it, especially since he, too, had a busy semester.
Still, I asked him if he could use some pictures of the various
materials and steps during an audioconference. He did so, and I think it
was a good idea, for it looked clearer afterwards!
However I'm sorry if I seemed reluctant to ask questions.

I hope this could answer your question. Can I use your email and mine
in my blog, in order to illustrate my point?

Sincerely,
Camille Croz"

So I think that I need to ask more questions and overall communicate some with my eventual coworker the next time I do a collaboration.

When rereading my last modifications, I noticed that I forgot to translate the notes in the "citations" part. It was not too hard, since it was only the name of the various materials that was used during the whole tuning process.
I only had to look back at the terms I used for the "Material" part and use the same translation.
However, I did change the layout of the "Citations" part. Originally, I was :
Link : (name of the material)

I changed it to :
Name of the material : Link
I thought it was more aesthetically pleasing, and easier to read!

Today, my american coworker send me his final version of the instruction guide. This version had been corrected by his technical writing teacher. Most of the issues were about phrase mechanics, punctuation, spelling and grammatical phrasing. The teacher also added some sentences with details that would allow a quicker understanding of the various steps.

Scott also added the sources of the images and schemas he used for this instruction guide, which is a very good thing in my opinion.

In short, I had to adjust my translation to these changes, and then translate the new addings.

My main issue during this process was to avoid repetitions of the same word in one single step. For example, in the teacher's added instructions, the word "guide file" (affuteuse) was apparearing three times in one step. In my opinion, this kind of repetition can be a burden to the user, when he's reading the instructions.

Furthermore, I am rather satisfied about my translation when I see the american teacher's comments on the guide. I think I was able to rephrase some sentences so that it would be clearer, or transpose some measures. For example, Scott used the "foot" measures in one part of the document, and his teacher wrote that -for the translator's sake- it would be better not to talk about foot, but about meters.

However, I already translate this "foot" matter into meters, because leaving it would be useless for a french reader. 

Somehow, it gives me the impression that I've made the good decision in a translation. As a learning translator, I feel like I've learnt to have the good reflexes, so I liked to think of this project as a way to sharpen my translating capacities.

Since I've finished my translation, I decided to send the final version to my american coworker before I send it to my teacher. I'm going to ask him to tell me about the global readability of my work, since I had several layout differences problems when I worked on the document on different computers.
I'm rather satisfied about how this translation went on. I do like working on my translations from the very beginning, and I don't like doing it all on the last minute, so I think it ended up okay. Thanks to that work on this instruction guide, I was able to judge what was good about a document, and what can be improvable about it from an external point of view, and then work on it during the translation.

If my coworker think the presentation of the text is good, I'll send both of our documents to my teacher.