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.

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.

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.

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!

Last week, one of our clients contacted us with an update of a manual we had previously translated from English into Russian. The client made changes to the source text and now wanted us to make the same changes in the Russian version by updating the old translations and adding the new ones directly in the manual (Microsoft Word format). While this is not our preferred approach to updates, it’s totally fine with us, because it helps clients to avoid DTP costs (such costs are typical of the industry-standard approach, which is to translate the entire new version using the translation memory from the previous version). We extracted all modified and new sentences and translated them using the old TM. We then proceeded to insert them in the previous version. At this point, much to our surprise, we discovered that our translation had been edited by someone else. For consistency reasons, we now had to examine the “surprise” edits and then adjust our new translations accordingly.

Such “surprise” review also happened to us a few times before, so I decided to put together a blog post about it based on this example. I will focus mainly on the downsides. Please don’t get me wrong, I love clients’ reviews and believe they are mostly beneficial. The “surprise” review is beneficial too, but it may also create unnecessary problems. And in this case, avoiding the problem is definitely easier than struggling with its aftermath.

1. While a person doing the review, whether a client’s employee or their local distributor, is normally qualified to do the job from the subject matter expertise perspective, this person may not be an expert translation-wise and introduce a variety of errors into the translation. For example, as a translation company, spell checking and automatic quality assurance on each translation are in our DNA. In contrast, a client’s editor may not even be aware of these tools, let alone use them routinely.
2. A very common type of error associated with surprise review is inconsistency. This is a serious problem that can result in misleading translations. Imagine an end user scratching their head over a manual that randomly uses three different names for the same procedure. Inconsistency will also confuse folks who will provide future translations to this client, because they will normally want to keep the new translation consistent with the old material. But how can they do it with the old stuff inconsistent in the first place?

This post is continued in part 2.

OmegaT provides an incredibly powerful capability to filter segments in the editor pane. A similar function is available in other translation environment tools as well, e.g. Wordfast allows you to select just 100% matches or fuzzy matches for easy navigation. OmegaT, however, takes this functionality to a whole new level. This post describes some of its applications.

The basic idea of using a filter is to save time by limiting your scope of work to only those segments that require attention, while also making navigation between them instantaneous. To apply a filter, you need to open the Text Search window (Ctrl+F), perform a search to find all segments you need, and then click Filter in the lower right corner. The OmegaT editor pane will now display and make available for editing only those segments. To disable the filter, perform any other search, click Filter, and then Remove Filter.

1. Perhaps, the greatest benefit our translation company derived from using this feature is the ability to remove unpaid 100% matches from the scope of work. This ability is essential when a client wants to insert 100% matches in the current translation automatically and without any review, thus avoiding the costs associated with reviewing them. It makes sense then to exclude such 100% matches from the workflow to a reasonable extent. While translating, you can simply skip 100% matches by going to the next untranslated segment each time (Ctrl+U). For the editing step, however, this shortcut obviously doesn’t work. This is when a filter comes in handy. All you need to do is come up with the appropriate search criteria that will find only the segments changed in the course of translation. An example of such criteria is searching for all TM entries committed under a specific translator’s name. After finding them and applying the filter, you will be able to focus exclusively on the required segments.
2. You often need to make global changes, e.g. to ensure a term is translated consistently. The straightforward way is to find the segments containing this term through the Text Search window and then start clicking the segments one by one to open and modify them in the editor. Clearly, the more occurrences of this term you have, the less efficient this navigation procedure gets. In such cases, we sometimes prefer to open the project’s TM in a text editor such as Notepad++ and make changes there in order to do it faster. The filter feature reduces the need for this type of workaround by allowing you to display only those segments that require changes and move through them with speed.
3. To process TTX files that include already translated Context TM (Perfect Match, XU) segments, we use the great Toxic utility to convert the files to the format supported by OmegaT. The downside of this process is that OmegaT incorrectly provides the target text of such Context TM segments for translation as if it were the source text (due to Toxic’s method of conversion). Just as with the unpaid 100% matches, these segments can slow you down. To increase efficiency, you can use the filter feature to exclude them from the scope of work.
4. Recently, I mentioned that OmegaT now provides the note feature. The filter function can help optimize this feature as well. After finding all segments with notes in the Text Search window, you can apply a filter to display these segments and move through them directly in the editor pane, rather than do this by clicking each segment in the Text Search window and switching back to the editor. Again, the more segments with notes you have, the more efficiency a filter will bring.

Creating and maintaining a glossary for a specific client is a best practice in the translation industry. A glossary contains client’s terminology, making it easier to access approved translations and ensure consistency across this client’s projects. There are, however, a few common pitfalls that can render glossaries difficult to use or misleading. This post provides a few suggestions about how you can avoid such pitfalls to get the most out of your glossaries.

Challenge: Many glossaries are created before the actual translation starts, by extracting and translating a list of frequent terms. This supposedly helps translators to access correct terms easily and avoid discrepancy in the course of the project. While the idea of creating a glossary in advance is undoubtedly reasonable, its actual implementation can be far from perfect. The terms in such list are translated out of context, which inevitably results in a significant percentage of too general translations or even mistranslations. The resulting glossary becomes misleading and can either cause errors in future translations or, in case of a client-approved glossary, create delays in the project schedule, because the translation team will need to compile a list of suggested corrections and wait for the client to approve them.

Solution: I recommend to create your glossary along the way, so that it contains correct translations based on understanding rather than translator’s guesses.

Challenge: Glossaries tend to contain words that are completely irrelevant to their purpose. These can be verbs, names of countries, general nouns, etc. Instead of helping translators, they are downright misleading. Each time a general verb or noun requires a translation different from the one provided in the glossary (and this happens extremely often!), a translator becomes confused, wondering whether it is okay to use a better translation instead of the glossary item that would make little sense in the current context. The more irrelevant words a glossary contains, the less usable it is.

Solution: It is best to have a glossary that is focused on real terms specific to this end client and avoid general words.

Challenge: It is not uncommon to regard a glossary as an “ultimate authoritative source” and comply with it blindly, irregardless of what common sense might be telling you. For example, a translator following this principle may intentionally use a glossary translation, even if it doesn’t fit the current context or is obviously incorrect. An editor who spots a different translation may rush to overwrite it without considering possible reasons behind such deviation from the glossary. Also, the same way of thinking may prevent the end client from allowing changes to the glossary.

Solution: It pays to be flexible about your glossary. A glossary is not always an ultimate authoritative source. We have been maintaining and meticulously improving some of our English to Russian translation glossaries for years, and they still don’t fit all contexts! Written communications are unique and create so many different contexts that it’s impossible and impractical to have all imaginable translations in a single glossary.