Velior's Corporate Blog about Translation and Translation Industry

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 in the first place 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.

When we launched Velior in 2005, our range of specializations was very limited: consumer electronics manuals, general texts, simple legal texts, simple marketing texts, and that’s basically it. Gradually, by working on an array of long-term projects, we developed new areas of expertise, which go way beyond those basic specializations in terms of complexity. This post begins a series of articles describing some of the recently added advanced specializations.

In 2007, we started to translate what we refer to as “corporate documents.” The volume of work in this area has been growing steadily ever since, with the number of words translated from English into Russian so far approaching 1 million words. By “corporate documents,” we mean any materials that provide some form of instruction for company’s employees and are typically designed for internal use. Most of them are associated with Human Resources (HR) processes. The demand for these materials mainly comes from larger companies with global presence that operate in Russia and/or other Russian-speaking countries. Providing documents to employees in their native language makes good business sense for such companies, because a Russian version makes it easier for them to understand and comply with the company’s guidelines. In contrast, with no translated version available, it’s quite hard to hold employees accountable for something they might not have known or understood in the first place.

The most common types of content include:

• Codes of conduct
• Policies and procedures
• Job descriptions
• Management training materials
• Evaluations and questionnaires
• Internal communications
• Intranet portals

By working on these types of content almost on a daily basis and through communication with our clients’ employees who edit our translations, we’ve gained significant experience that provides a solid foundation for our current and future translations in this area. We now have the knowledge of a typical company structure, performance management and appraisal, payroll, investor relations, salary grades, and compliance matters, to name a few. Whenever we come across a very specific term such as merit, 360 feedback, band differential, below minimum range adjustment, banded population, talent pipeline, FCPA, the translation comes easy and reads natural.

In fact, in a few cases we were even able to help our client’s editors with translation of a term or phrase that they struggled with or misunderstood, despite the fact that they obviously know their company’s processes better than we do. It was a pleasure to have a chance to give back for all the learning opportunities created by the steady stream of work in this area from our clients. It is exclusively through their long-term loyalty that we were able to add this specialization to our range of services.

We love to work with direct clients based in our city, Ivanovo. This happens rarely though, because we can’t handle most requests we receive. I would like to use this post to describe these types of requests. If you are a potential client, I hope this post will save you time if you are considering enlisting our services for such a request. There are two general types of requests that we don’t handle:

1. Translation of personal documents such as passports, marriage licenses, or death certificates.

Such translations normally require certification by a notary public, which we don’t offer. It is my experience that the local notaries who provide this service prefer to work with translators they know. For this reason, we refer such requests to the offices of the notaries or other local translation companies who specialize in this kind of services.

Also, many language combinations involved in such requests are rare and are completely outside of our area of expertise (English to Russian translation). We don’t have an established working relationship with translators of such combinations, which is essential in our line of business: you need to work with a translator on a regular basis to be sure that they are dependable and will continue to match your quality expectations.

Perhaps, the only exception we make with this type of requests is medical records. They do fall within our area of expertise, and we are quite comfortable handling them thanks to years of experience with medical translations.

2. The second type of requests is the translations required for information purposes, rather than publication purposes. This means that a lower rate and fast turnaround are much more important to a prospective client than the quality of translation. An example could be an operation manual that a local company wants translated to get a general idea of how to operate a piece of machinery. I find this approach to quality and price extremely reasonable, because paying more than necessary in such cases is often a waste of a company’s money. If I were a company representative in need of a translation with little concern for high quality, I would also go for bargain basement prices, having no motivation to pay more for something I don’t need. Therefore, as a provider that puts quality first, takes extra time to do a good job, and charges our clients accordingly, we can’t be of much help in such cases. When we get this type of requests, we normally explain that our quality and rates might be unnecessarily high for this kind of job and refer a prospect to another vendor who is better positioned to meet their requirements.

Aside from the above types of requests, we very much enjoy servicing local clients, because a face-to-face contact is rare in our line of business and is therefore especially treasured!

For more information on  how to choose your language service provider, please read this article.

Last year, I explained why we think reasonable deadlines are beneficial for both clients and translators. Now, I would like to expand on one of those advantages: the quality of translation.

I see a direct correlation between the time allowed for translation and its quality. If a translation team is required to deliver earlier than they would normally prefer, something has to give. And often this something is the value-adding activities that contribute to quality.

In the complex multilingual projects of today, a common approach is to allow less time for the translation step compared to the other steps. For instance, the turnaround for the translation can be as short as a few days, while the DTP or proofreading steps take weeks. What this can do to the quality of the final product is quite obvious: you can spend weeks on polishing the layout and fixing minor typesetting errors, but if your translation is poor in the first place, this is a total waste of time. You are essentially putting a beautiful wrapping over a rotten core. Even if your wrapping is very good, it is unlikely to be of any help to the end users who will not be able to understand the basic message.

What are the exact activities a translation team is forced to reduce or eliminate altogether when a deadline is tight? Let me give you two examples from our practice:

1. Ideally, a translator should take at least one day to complete the translation and then review it on the next day. Having the ability to take a break from the project and continue on the next day makes a major difference in terms of quality. This break enables the translator to look at the translation more critically and spot errors they could not see before. Obviously, by operating under a tight deadline, which does not allow this kind of break, the translator’s performance goes down.
2. The next step is editing by a second linguist. We have discovered two activities, which are crucial to quality at this step, but are often skipped under tight deadlines. First, if time permits, the editor can discuss the issues they are unsure about with the translator instead of going ahead and making corrections, which might turn out to be wrong. Second, the translator has the ability to check the corrections made by the editor to make sure no errors were introduced. It is therefore quite unfortunate when these two activities are skipped due to a tight deadline.

What can you do to make sure you benefit from the value-adding quality assurance activities? My recommendation is to simply put quality first by giving your translator the time they deem necessary to do a good job. Remember the very basic idea taught by Dr. William Deming to the Japanese, which helped Japan rise to prominence: quality is cheaper. By simply allowing a few more days, you can avoid weeks or even months of fixing quality problems, as well as loss of business.

What is your experience with the correlation between deadline and quality of translation? Do you agree that quality might be cheaper?

This post expands on my older entry about the role of proofreading and the importance of having it done by a qualified person, ideally your original translator. Now, I would like to follow up on, and reinforce, the idea that using someone who is not qualified to do proofreading or dropping it altogether can result in problems ranging from slightly reduced quality to simply unusable content.

Blunders + Proofreading = Happy Ending

With website translations, many clients prefer to copy their website content into a text file, have it translated, and then paste it back. This means a manual, error-prone process. Some time ago, we did an English to Russian translation of a pharmaceutical company’s website, and the person who manually pasted our translations to the site made a major error. One of the pages had a table with the drug names in the left column and their descriptions in the right column. In one of the rows, the specialist erroneously replaced a drug name with its description, leaving the next (description) cell empty. Instead of two cells, the resulting row had just one cell, and, to make things worse, this cell was also invalid. Luckily, the client did request proofreading, which made it possible to find and correct the blunder.

Website that Could Use Some Proofreading

The second example is also a recent website project—German to Russian translation for an equipment manufacturer. Here, no proofreading was ordered at all. Some time after delivery, I checked this website, since I wanted to showcase our work to a prospect from the same industry. What I saw, however, made me completely abandon the idea of showing it to anyone:

Untranslated English section names: “Home” and “Shop.” While these English words might look okay in the original German version, they look plain weird on the Russian pages. Perhaps, the translation was pasted and/or proofread by a native German speaker who assumed that because leaving “Home” and “Shop” untranslated is alright in German, this should be equally acceptable in any other language.

Russian word order replaced by German word order. This was probably triggered by similar thinking (okay in German, should be okay elsewhere). In fact, it was again incorrect, resulting in phrases such as “XYZ-cuttng tool.” First, the manufacturer’s name (XYZ) cannot be placed in front of the product name with a hyphen like this. Second, “XYZ” connects with a hyphen to the adjective instead of the main noun, which is grammatically incorrect.

Em dashes were globally replaced either by question marks (probably, damaged during pasting) or hyphens (perhaps, the person who did the pasting noticed some of those question marks and replaced them by what was in the source text). Now, using a hyphen instead of an em dash is not very good in Russian, but will likely go unnoticed with most readers. However, a question mark in the middle of a sentence is clearly inappropriate.

A few paragraphs were assembled from the sentences that we originally translated as standalone pieces, without any full stops. What resulted was paragraphs consisting of just one very long sentence.

These examples illustrate what might happen when a linguistic decision is made by someone who doesn’t know the target language, and the result of this decision never gets checked. Based on this kind of experiences, I am an avid advocate of proofreading the final content, whether it’s files, software, or websites. As it usually takes little time and just a small fraction of your project budget, it’s really cheaper to do it and be safe than deal with potential consequences. An attempt to save on this step may backfire in much greater loss of business when your prospects are turned away by blunders.

This post offers a few explanations on what time of the day is best to place an order with our translation company. Our time zone is GMT +03:00, Moscow, which equals CET +02:00 and EST -08:00. These explanations are provided as a friendly recommendation only and are in no way intended to limit your freedom of choice as a customer. You are of course welcome to place your orders any time you want.

1. A very obvious, but nonetheless essential recommendation is to place your order as soon as you can, i.e. avoiding any unnecessary delay. In translation industry, deadlines are often so tight that even 3-4 extra hours can make a huge difference. Your effort to give your translator more time is always appreciated and (a) helps avoid unnecessary rush that often creates error, (b) leaves more time to spend on making sure our translation is flawless, and (c) ensures that we give priority to your project (and not to someone else’s that may arrive in the meantime).
2. The best time of the day to place an order is until GMT 1-2 PM (our local time is 4-5 PM then). This is when we are finalizing our schedule for the next day(s) and are still able to fit in your project in a way that fully meets your preferred schedule.
3. If you place an order after that, we can start translation the next morning at the earliest. We do monitor email outside of opening hours and will confirm availability or send a quote, but actual production is normally not possible, because it is already evening at our location.
4. For US-based clients, the time difference almost equals one working day. Specifically, when you come to the office, we are usually done for the day, and vice versa, we are working, while you are still sleeping. This time difference has a few consequences. First, it makes it difficult to deliver on the same day you send a job, because when you do so, we are either already leaving the office or spending an evening at home. There is really little time left to honor your request on that same day. Second, and this is a good one, you receive most completed jobs not at the EOB, but in the morning when you come to the office. Because you already have the translation in the morning, you can plan your further work on this project more efficiently. For example, when you send a short addition/change to a previous translation at the EOB, you can rest assured that you’ll receive translation already the next morning.
5. For US-based clients, if you send a 24-hour turnaround job, we normally need to receive your go-ahead on the same day, because if you send it on the next day, we might not have enough time left to complete it. For example, you send us a 1,000-word English-Russian translation at 5 PM your time and want it by the EOB next day. We reply to your request only around 1 AM your time, which means that you give a go-ahead at around 9 AM. But then our working day is essentially over, and we don’t have enough time to translate this 1,000-word project until your deadline. This is not always easy to understand, because you still have the entire working day in front of you. So, in such cases, we very much appreciate if you give your go-ahead on the same day you send the job (or simply include such go-ahead directly in your original request).

I hope this explanation will help you better understand our operations and improve efficiency of our working relationship. If you need a further explanation, feel free to add a comment here or send an email to info@velior.ru.

This post discusses specifics of the “native speaker” notion in relation to Russian to English translation. Normally, just as with many other combinations, this translation is best accomplished by a native speaker who can translate more efficiently into their native language by definition. However, with Russian to English translation, the choice isn’t always straightforward.

1. Compared to Spanish to English or English to Russian, RU-EN is a less popular combination, with a limited choice of available native-speaking translators. This results in higher rates and sometimes makes it challenging to find an immediately available translator, especially in an urgent scenario. Finding a non-native speaker of English for such combination is a much simpler task.
2. Some clients prefer a native speaker, but are not prepared to pay more than they normally do for EN-RU translation. In other words, they expect that RU-EN rate should be basically similar to EN-RU. While this does make sense theoretically, it is not how things really are in this language pair. In fact, many EN-RU translators, native speakers of Russian, charge rates lower than an industry average. One reason for this is generally low pay rates in Russia or the CIS countries where most of such translators are based. Native speakers of English based in developed countries are not prepared to work for the same rate and can charge twice or three times more than that. Using a non-native speaker seems a very compelling option for those clients who expect EN-RU price tag for RU-EN translation or simply don’t want to pay more when they can pay less.
3. The Russian language has complex grammar rules, which makes it more difficult to understand for a native speaker of English. Another reason that often makes understanding difficult is low literacy of the authors. For these reasons, a native speaker of Russian may seem a more natural choice.
4. In general, a native speaker doesn’t necessarily guarantee a high-quality translation. It is my experience that some clients feel otherwise, because they appear focused exclusively on getting a native speaker and, while doing so, pay less attention to other quality-related factors. The truth is that you can’t really check whether your vendor is or has a native speaker—you can only trust them. Because of this, it is important to consider a variety of factors rather than base your judgment on the “native speaker” capacity alone. Remember that a poor translation is still a poor translation, regardless of whether it was done by a native speaker or not.

Here is an example from our experience to give you a feel of these specifics:

In a long-term project, which we were translating from English to Russian, an agency client requested a RU-EN translation. They specifically wanted a native speaker of English, and when we couldn’t provide one, they turned to another vendor who confirmed availability of such translator. As we proofread their translations later, it was clear that they hadn’t been done by a native speaker of English, e.g. Russian word order was preserved in English. So, while the vendor met the requirement formally, they ultimately failed to deliver on the client’s expectations.

For more tips on choosing your translation supplier, please read this article.

This post discusses Velior’s policy on the translation memories created by someone else. It applies to the situations where a translation job comes together with an existing TM, i.e. another translator worked on it previously, and it is new to us. In such cases, we prefer to calculate all words as new despite the TM leverage, or at least increase the standard 100% and fuzzy match rate. Here is why:

1. Most importantly, we cannot be sure about the quality of the existing translations. This represents a risk of spending uncompensated time on reviewing and correcting them. We cannot afford to take such risk free-of-charge.
2. Our opinion of the external TMs is largely influenced by Velior’s internal quality policy. For example, in our own work, we minimize the risk of mistranslations and omissions by using an independent editor in each job and eliminate the risk of terminology inconsistency through an automated QA. Because of this policy, we expect the same level of quality from the external TMs, and where they fail to meet these expectations, we have to spend additional time on editing them.
3. While considering a job involving an external TM, you also need to evaluate the TM quality. This means spending additional uncompensated time. If the job is assigned to us after all, I don’t have any objection to this. If the job is however placed somewhere else, I personally feel disappointed because of the time wasted in such an unproductive way. Reading someone else’s irrelevant old translations, that is.
4. Whenever you re-use a fuzzy match in a new segment, you have to review or at least read the existing portion of the translation. The typical TM-related rates are however geared towards paying for translating the new text only. With the external TMs, the effort invested in reviewing the existing portion is therefore either not compensated at all or compensated only partially.
5. If you encounter any inconsistency issues in the provided TM, you have to check the entire current job for such issues, including the 100% matches. This additional work is not covered by the typical TM-related rates. Simply put, you are paid to only review the existing translations briefly, but not to correct any errors. The provided TM is naturally expected to be correct, otherwise why provide it all?
6. Quite a few external TMs we worked with included translations that were completely unusable due to the technical issues such as a wrong encoding, damaged special characters, or incorrectly aligned translations (probably aligned by a non-native speaker). Such problems normally don’t surface until you delve deeper into the TM in the course of translation—already after accepting the job. You end up re-translating them at your expense.
7. The writing style used in the previous translations is often different from your own, but you are expected to follow that style to maintain consistency. This normally requires an additional effort, e.g. you need to specifically check that you did not use your own style unconsciously. Again, this is not compensated by the standard TM-related rates.