Velior's Corporate Blog about Translation and Translation Industry

This is part 2 of this post. For part 1, please follow this link.

Thinking Translation Doesn’t Matter

Even if you agree with the above considerations, you might still believe that your product is so appealing that translation—whether good or bad—can neither add, nor decrease value. Or you may assume that your suite of marketing tools in the original language is so powerful that any quality of translation will do. Again, such approach might be appropriate with less important translations, but with customer-facing content, it can be disastrous. Imagine a user who looks at your product on a website and scratches their head, having hard time figuring out what the product’s features are from a sloppy translation next to it.

Below are two examples illustrating the paradigm of thinking I’m trying to challenge in this post—marketing, in particular when it comes to translation, is secondary to the product or service:

General Electric’s Acquisition

This is an example from Winning by GE’s legend, Jack Welch. It shows how overemphasizing your product and your own marketing strategy while completely dismissing other forms of marketing can lead to decreased sales. In 1988, GE acquired an engineering plastics business from BorgWarner. GE had an engineering plastics division of its own and sought to create cost synergy by selling BW products through GE’s distribution channel. What GE failed to recognize, however, was the difference in the marketing approach used by the two companies. The GE salespeople were accustomed to making a technical sale, convincing engineers to switch from metal to plastic. BW sold commodity-like products in the old-fashion way, relying on personal relationships and hefty expense accounts. GE decided it didn’t need this kind of marketing and let go 90% of BW’s sales force. As the assumption proved to be incorrect, GE saw its market share drop dramatically, and the acquisition never reached its full potential.

Russian to English Localization

This example illustrates how a sloppy translation turns away folks, in particular when written communications is how you primarily get your message across. This is what a Russian PC game publisher experienced after localizing into English a PC game that was a runaway hit in Russia. Although everything but the seemingly unimportant aspect—translation—was identical, the English version didn’t fare as well as the Russian one. Released in 2008, the English game received an average ranking of just 60% from the major game portals. Some of the end-user comments were:

• “This isn’t mana from heaven, it’s acid rain. There’s pain on every front. Badly translated English? Check. This isn’t just the odd typo and misused word; some of the dialogue makes very little sense full stop, and the storyline suffers as a result.”
• “It doesn’t cease to baffle me what went wrong when the developers hired a writer to write up the dialogue and the actors to deliver it… The text is filled with grammar errors and typos. The flow of the dialogue seems halting and the logical conclusions that the characters make based on the evidence they have are not well founded.”
• “… Endless badly written dialogues.”

Although the sales figures for this game are unavailable, it’s likely that with this kind of reception, the lost profits could easily outweigh the “savings” generated by buying cheap translation.

Summary

Whenever your translate any customer-facing materials, a simple rule to remember is that by saving on translation, you are likely to set your expansion up to fail, despite the great product or service. It doesn’t follow of course that a perfect translation guarantees success. But if your product fails in a foreign market, at least you won’t wonder whether you lost the entire investment due to saving inappropriately on what was just a fraction of the total expansion budget.

This post resulted from an internal discussion of a highly-priced quote for a Russian to English website translation. In the course of preparing the quote, I suggested to charge our highest rate while our project manager maintained that this didn’t make sense because the client would never agree. I knew it was likely to be true, but still wouldn’t budge. To sell him on my point of view, I emphasized two considerations. First, since the website was designed to sell a product, we had to deliver high-quality English translation. Second, to be able to do that, we needed to charge our highest rate. In fact, anything less than our best job could turn away at least some of this prospect’s potential clientele, preventing them from realizing the full potential of the investment in translation.

Now, why was the prospect unlikely to accept the quote? Most clients generally want to receive an excellent translation that will provide a high return on investment. But when it comes to decision-making, many focus primarily on the price tag instead of quality, thus reducing the likelihood of achieving the intended result. So, my goal for this longer post is to explain why it might be beneficial to appreciate translation as what it often is—a marketing investment or instrument—and invest wisely.

Approaching Translation from Marketing Perspective

One common purpose of buying translation for many companies is to expand into new countries to tap the revenue potential there. When faced with a vendor choice, they have a plethora of options. The translation rates vary widely—from those offered by the hobby translators to seemingly sky-high rates of the industry veterans—making the sourcing process a challenge. What is the right choice for you? The first step is to understand what it is that you exactly expect from this translation. For those translations that are unlikely to affect your business, it might be indeed appropriate to sacrifice quality for cost. But whenever you translate any customer-facing materials, it makes sense to recognize translation as a marketing expense; that is, an investment that your future earnings rely upon. When you come from that place, you perceive translation not as an overhead or commodity, but rather something of value that your success hinges on.

Saving Pennies while Losing Thousands

Even if you see translation primarily as a marketing tool, a high translation rate might still give you a sticker shock, especially when you think that it’ll be easy to translate your materials. Let’s take a look at it at a different angle though. How much does providing your potential clients with a poor translation cost you in terms of lost profits? A badly translated company brochure or business proposal can make it difficult for your prospects to understand your message, severely reducing your chances of winning their business. A poor translation is really a potential bottleneck to your expansion which can render other efforts and advantages meaningless. You might have the best product in the world accompanied by a great marketing strategy, but a vague or ridiculous translation can nonetheless lay the foundation for failure.

This post is continued in part 2.

The “quality triangle” is a very basic, yet powerful way to describe the relationships between the three main dimensions of translation services: quality, time, and price. What it means is that something always has to give. That is, whenever you overemphasize one of the dimensions, the triangle loses equilibrium and two other dimensions suffer. I think this triangle concept perfectly applies to our services, and this post provides recommendations for those clients who wish to receive a perfectly balanced service. The insights I’m offering are general observations, i.e. they don’t apply in every situation. For example, a lower rate doesn’t necessarily lead to lower quality, and so on. The key message is, however, that it’s more likely to do so than not.

Overemphasizing translation quality: Higher quality of work requires investing more time in various types of quality-related activities such as editing by a second linguist, asking your client to clarify ambiguous phrases, checking terminology consistency, or automatic quality assurance check. Among these activities, editing is probably the most time-intensive process because it involves a rigorous, time-consuming check by another person. While editing itself significantly increases the turnaround time, managing this process between several team members also adds transition time. So, whenever you put quality first, you can expect a longer deadline. And since more energy and resources are typically necessary for producing a higher quality translation, your translation provider is also likely to expect a higher price. For example, let’s assume a company like ours produces 500 words of English to Russian translation per hour, thereby making $50 per hour. If a client requests a top-notch quality translation, e.g. for a business proposal, the productivity may drop by as much as 50 percent. The team will then want to double the rate per word, or else it will make just $25 per hour.

Overemphasizing urgency: The quality of work suffers under tight deadlines as less time is available for the quality-oriented activities. Moreover, if things go sideways (and by Murphy’s law, they often do), but the project schedule is so straight-jacketed that every minute counts, quality may drop in an order of magnitude because working under pressure is a major source of error. To avoid or at least minimize the negative impact, a translation team may offer to work overtime so that it literally creates additional time required to do a good job. While the overtime does help to ensure an appropriate level of quality, it may also wreak havoc in the team’s short-term schedule and usually forces folks to work beyond standard hours or on weekends. This additional effort is compensated by a higher price, usually in a form of a surcharge to the standard rate such as 50% or 100%.

Overemphasizing cost: I think this is the worst-case scenario where quality typically takes the biggest hit because by imposing a lower rate may discourage a vendor from doing their best job. One common reason for requesting a price reduction is a volume discount. Although volume is indeed a legitimate basis for a discount under certain circumstances, such discount isn’t quite as clear-cut as e.g. a wholesale discount. In fact, volume doesn’t always translate into time savings that could justify any discount. A team facing this kind of situation may want to avoid financial loss by increasing productivity. And with translation, higher productivity very often results in lower quality, up to what I believe to be an apocalyptic scenario—involving a less competent translator and/or eliminating the independent review step. By the same token, the deadline may suffer because the team is likely to have better-paying jobs in the pipeline and may, therefore, put your project on the back burner until capacity for low-margin work is available.

For more information about Velior’s translation services designed to strike a balance between the three dimensions, please see this page.

We charge for translation mainly per the number of source words. This means that for each source word—whether it’s something as long and seemingly difficult as “pregelinatined” or as short as the article “a”—a client pays the same rate. Charging a single rate might appear controversial to some clients, resulting in a sticker shock: “Why would I pay the same rate for those words that require little or no work?” At first glance, such pricing does seem to make little sense. For instance, with English to Russian translations, you don’t translate the articles “a” and “the,” but simply omit them. Here is a possible explanation of why this pricing method is generally accepted as fair:

Besides those simple words, almost any translation job involves more challenging words that, in contrast, require effort beyond the standard rate. Examples include:

1. Words that don’t exist or have no commonly accepted counterpart in the target language, e.g. “matrix team” in Russian.
2. Words that are extremely difficult to translate because they don’t have an identical equivalent in the target language. One of my favorite examples is the word “leadership” which is now often used instead of “management.” The literal Russian translation “лидерство” doesn’t carry any meaning of “management” at all. The closest match is probably “руководство,” but it doesn’t fully convey the meaning of “being a leader”. For more information about this kind of translation challenges, I invite you to read this post.
3. Unclear or incorrect wordings which appear to say one thing, while the author actually had in mind something completely different. I don’t think any example is necessary in this category because misunderstanding is so common in all aspects of life. Just ask yourself: do I get my message across to others correctly 100% of the time?

To illustrate, let’s make a simplified calculation based on the assumption that you translate on average 300 words per hour. This means approximately 5 words per minute or 1 word in 12 seconds. At the rate of $0.1 per word, you make 300 x $0.1 = $30 per hour. And it’s natural that you want to make $30 for each hour spent on translating.

Now, imagine yourself working on a text so challenging that you occasionally have to spend 5 or 10 minutes on a single word instead of 12 seconds. Gradually, you are falling behind your expected productivity level. If you continue to get many challenging words downstream, there is no way you can achieve your average amount of 300 words per hour. You might end up making $20, $10, or even $1 per hour instead.

This is when simpler words come to improve your performance. While spending too much time on the challenging words, you also have a certain amount of articles, prepositions, and similar words that you can translate much, much faster. With these words, you don’t need 12 seconds per word, but rather just one second or less. By spending less time on simpler words, you can make up for the time you lose on the more difficult ones. So, one possible rationale for charging the same rate for the “little effort” words is to assume it’s a form of compensation for the more difficult bits of the text.

2011 ended, and it’s time to reflect on some of the things that made this year incredibly good for us. We continued to successfully pursue our mission while also meeting most of our strategic goals and financial targets. This was made possible through the outstanding performance of our people who were just a joy to work with, requiring little or no management along the way.

In terms of mission and strategy, the highlights include:

• As we pursue the mission of being a servant to our clients and making their day-to-day work easier, our key performance indicator is the level of negative feedback. This year, we hardly had any substantial negative comments from the clients. Truth be told, there were occasional slips in our work just as they occur with virtually any product or service over time. They were, however, uncritical and statistically insignificant.
• We are finding new and better ways to increase quality. In 2011, we introduced a new method of measuring and managing quality of English to Russian translations. The best thing about it was that it didn’t end up being just a fancy strategy. By consistently translating this initiative into execution, we were able to produce tangible results right from the start.
• As an organization, we are becoming flatter. The rationale for the changes is based on the empowerment ideas promoted by the likes of Gary Hamel, Stephen R. Covey, or Jim Collins, just to name a few. I feel strongly about these changes although it’s clear that they are challenging for our team and will take time. The results include higher engagement, increased commitment to quality, and organization climate improvement.

In terms of financial targets, we significantly increased revenue and margin as compared to 2010. The cornerstone of this achievement is of course our clients, and I would like to take the opportunity to express how privileged and happy we feel about having been able to serve you this year. Repeat business continues to account for a large percentage of our work which is something we are proud of and enjoy immensely. Relationships with some of our clients reached a five-year milestone this year! We are also excited about our new direct and agency clients, looking forward to forging strong relationships with them over time.

Last, but certainly not least, I am proud of how our people went above and beyond to support our way forward. With the organizational changes under way, they are exhibiting consistent growth, stronger work ethic, and commitment to meeting our shared goals through hard work and discretionary effort. I’d also like to thank all external translators—their indispensable contribution helped us complete important projects that would have otherwise been impossible. A special thanks goes out to Vladimir Rusakov, Olga Yakushina, and Ekaterina Ilyushina who did a fantastic job keeping this blog going. In 2011, we significantly increased blogging frequency, eventually publishing about 40 posts, and the team stood up to this challenge exceptionally well.

We hope that 2011 was just as good to our clients and readers. We wish you happiness and maximum achievement in 2012!

We are continually receiving requests from peer Russian translation agencies to subcontract work to us. While such indirect peer recognition is flattering, it usually doesn’t result in any relationship. The roadblock is our rates being the same or higher than the rates of an inquiring agency. Subcontracting work at such rates rarely makes business sense unless an agency wins a very huge translation project and, being unable to handle it all by itself, needs to outsource a portion to a trusted partner. The agency chooses to do so just for the sake of being able to take up the whole project, even if doing so brings no profit. Otherwise, it might lose the project altogether or fail to complete it on schedule.

Because such requests are a form of peer recognition, in the past, we would get so excited about them that we would rush into the relationship, without even thinking about the rates. Later, we would discover that the rates an agency expected us to work for were actually prohibitive. You can read about this kind of frustrating experience in an older post. Now, however, we are overriding the initial excitement with the understanding that this request is unlikely to result in any business. So, the first thing we now do is communicating our rates, which immediately acts as a brake on a potential relationship.

It seems that the common assumption is that provincial translation companies like ours have generally lower rates than Moscow-based agencies. Indeed, there is a common sense rationale behind this assumption, because operating an agency in Moscow might be more expensive due to higher cost of living and doing business. But the geographical location has never been a consideration in setting our rates. It is my opinion that most translation vendors are in fact competing with all other vendors on a global market enabled by Internet. This increasingly virtual market doesn’t really care where you are located physically. It is your competitive edge that determines your rates.

Personally, I think working with Russian translation agencies is an extremely remote possibility for us. Just as with most other Eastern European agencies, a major piece of their business comes from agencies in the U.S. and Western Europe, simply because this is where most clients are. As a subcontractor to another agency, a Russian agency is expected to charge less than it would charge to the same client if it worked with this client directly. This is perfectly normal, but my point is simply that many Eastern European agencies, including Russian, are likely to be turned away by our rates since their rates are relatively low in the first place.

Finally, here is the link to our current rates. I strongly encourage you to save time and energy by checking these rates before contacting us with a subcontracting offer. By the way, in January 2012, we slightly increased the rates, mainly because of adjustment for inflation, as well as our continued efforts to improve the quality of our work and be in the top 5% of English to Russian translation providers.

This is part 2 of this post. For part 1, please follow this link.

• For example, in his book How To Smell A Rat, an investment guru, Ken Fisher, suggests that consistently high performance of a money manager should always be a red flag; heeding this warning can help you avoid swindlers, as it was in Bernard Madoff‘s case. Similarly, a poorly written copy on a translation vendor’s website can be a red flag. Why trust your business to someone who isn’t competent enough or doesn’t care to put together an appealing copy even when good writing is called for? There are literally hundreds of translation agencies and freelancers on the market today, so, if anything alarms you, it’s extremely simple to cross this agency off your list and continue searching elsewhere.

3. Whenever an investor makes a decision based on emotions rather than sound judgment, the risk increases dramatically. When people were jumping on the bandwagon in the end of 1990s, just before the dot-com bubble burst, or holding on to their stocks when they began to fall in price after the bubble had burst, they were driven mainly by fear of being too late or missing “the opportunity of a lifetime.” What followed was evaporation of many small and big fortunes. In a similar vein, a translation buyer sets themselves up for financial loss if they don’t take time to select a vendor or put up the decision until the very last minute and then rush to find a vendor. This “emotional” approach is likely to cause financial loss due to lower quality, rush surcharge, and missing the chance to find a better “value for money.”

In summary, both investment and buying translation require careful due diligence and ideally close attention throughout the entire process. Unlike items on a supermarket shelf that you can pick up randomly with little or no risk of wasting your money, both investment instruments and translation are high-risk purchases, especially in today’s market with its downward pricing pressure. The key idea is to choose your translation vendor strategically and just as carefully as you would choose your investment company. And remember, buying translation is a skill that is just as difficult to master as investing. You might feel overwhelmed with the challenge of selecting and testing your potential vendor, but in the long run, it is your commitment to choosing the very best vendor that determines whether you realize a profit from your investment in translation or waste it.

I am always looking for analogies that we can use to explain to our existing or potential clients when and why translation quality is of paramount importance. One of such analogies I’ve recently thought of is investments. A major thing that buying translation and investing have in common is a huge risk of losing money. With investments, you suffer loss when the price of whatever you put your money into goes against you. With translations, you lose money by making a wrong vendor choice; that is, picking someone who is either completely incompetent or loses their commitment to quality over time. So, here are a few recommendations along the lines of this analogy.

1. Perhaps, the key idea, or survival technique, for most investors is not to lose money. Losing the invested amount basically means losing the time you spent making that money, a valuable piece of your life that you can never get back. Also, unlike the potential profit, the amount of money you can lose is terminal. When you see the last buck go down the drain, it means you are out. These reasons make it essential that you do whatever it takes to avoid losses. This is true for buying translation as well. Purchasing a poor translation means losing money, mainly because a bad translation can’t really deliver the expected results. In addition to losing your investment in the translation, you can also suffer additional loss in the form of damage to your brand or legal costs. It is therefore critical for any translation buyer to minimize the risk of financial loss just as they would do with their investments. Let’s see what specific steps you can take to protect your hard-earned capital.
2. The best practice is to investigate before you invest. For instance, when you want to invest in paper assets, you start from the top down, choosing a country, industry sector, and then specific stocks. You take time to perform a fundamental or technical analysis, or a combination thereof. If you consider investing with a money management firm, you need to look at its financial statement and previous performance. In other words, you want invest a lot of time in research before you actually invest any money. By the same token, a translation buyer should take time to carefully select a translation company before conducting business with it. You can ask for things such as testimonials, list of long-term clients, how long it has been in business, and so forth.

This post is continued in part 2.

Velior has been providing medical translations since 2006, starting with simple projects such as basic patient instructions, informed consents, or general lifestyle recommendations. By steadily accumulating expertise in this field and increasing general translation skills, we gradually worked our way up to the “major leagues,” including spine surgery, advanced drug patents, or microbial detection systems. We also make it our job to continually strengthen our quality focus, which is an essential prerequisite for successful translation in the medical field where an error can lead to a loss of health or even life. Some of the major areas of expertise and content types we support are listed below:

Specific Areas of Expertise

• Vital signs monitoring
• Cardiovascular system
• Guidewires, catheters
• Tomography
• Sonography

Content Types

• Directions for use
• Patient brochures
• Clinical trial protocols
• Drug patents
• Healthcare facility brochures
• Medical records
• Software

Persistent professionalism is probably the No. 1 prerequisite for any translator who engages in this line of work. As a provider of professional medical translations, we understand the high level of responsibility associated with these projects and are committed to always providing the best quality product. By contrast, assigning this type of translation to a vendor who puts productivity first and quality second can be disastrous. Errors resulting from using an inappropriately qualified vendor are simply unacceptable in medical projects. While a mistranslation in a user manual for a home appliance is usually uncritical, although still frustrating, errors in medical texts are much more damaging, because they are likely to have a negative impact on health of one or more individuals or client’s image. Our key competitive edge—commitment to quality—dramatically reduces the risk or such errors. For instance, it’s not uncommon for us to go an extra mile by checking a medical translation three or four times instead of two times, which is our standard process.

Another advantage we bring to the table in this area is the high level of general translation skills. Medical content is oftentimes provided for translation, in particular by translation agencies, in complicated tagged formats designed for processing in translation environment tools. Quite a few translators, however, don’t support or are reluctant to handle these formats. In contrast, Velior has extensive experience and tools necessary to process such formats. Another area of medical translation requiring a high level of translation skills is software localization. To localize software, it’s absolutely essential to not only understand the subject matter, but also to be aware of the specifics associated with this type of content such as Microsoft Windows terminology commonly accepted as the golden standard, different translation of a graphical user interface item depending on its location, hot key ampersands, line breaks, etc. Equipped with both professional skills and subject matter expertise in the area of healthcare products and services, our translation company can therefore offer a unique selling proposition to clients in this industry.

If you need a medical translation, please contact us today for a free quote.

This is part 2 of this post. For part 1, please follow this link.

1. There are two types of inconsistency. The first type is inconsistency at the term level. To avoid errors of this kind, we use tools such as glossaries and QA Distiller to automatically check for any discrepancies. A client’s editor doesn’t always recognize the importance of consistency and doesn’t have the proper tools to maintain it. The second type is inconsistency at the sentence level. The translation environment tools we routinely use in our work provide specific functions that make it extremely simple to avoid any discrepancies of this kind. This means that a similar sentence is unlikely to be translated differently within a project. A client’s editor, by contrast, typically works in Microsoft Word, which isn’t designed to provide such functions. Imagine that you spent your morning editing half of a translation project, then switched to some other tasks during the day, and finally returned to the project in the evening. When you come across a sentence that is an exact match of, or very similar to, a sentence you edited in the morning, chances are that you won’t remember your previous edits accurately and make a different edit or no edit at all. These small inconsistencies may add up in the long run, making the translation misleading.
2. Because a client’s editor often uses Microsoft Word for “surprise” review, the project’s translation memory doesn’t get updated. This is exactly what happened to us last week. What this means is that for future translations, folks will use outdated TM, resulting in inconsistency, lower translators’ performance, and yes, misleading translations.
3. The “surprise” review means that a client’s editor did not provide the changes for revision to the original translator. This is always a risk, since the translator is usually able to point out any incorrect changes, including the above-mentioned types of errors. By doing review in a “surprise” fashion, you miss the chance to make sure the translation is flawless and also educate your translator. You might end up with the translation that contains multiple errors and the translation vendor who is unaware of your changes and will stick to the old translations in any future work for you. This cycle will repeat itself until you let the vendor know about your edits.

To conclude, we highly recommend avoiding “surprise” review and using the normal review process instead. All it takes is just one simple step: send your edits to your translator. A professional translator will then take care of the rest: check your edits, fix any errors or inconsistencies, update the TM, and learn from your edits for better translations in the future. Good luck!