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.

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!

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.

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.

This post is designed to review some of the changes implemented in the latest version of OmegaT, 2.5.0, released this week. The new version introduced quite many new features. This time, however, I will focus on only those that we are already using for English to Russian translation on a daily basis.

1. OmegaT now supports multiple translations of identical segments (internal repetitions). Previously, whenever a repetition needed a translation different from the one used elsewhere in the project, we would insert a special mark in this segment. After creating the translated documents, we would search for the mark and adjust the translation as required. Hardly effective, this approach is now history. Whenever you want to use a different translation for an internal repetition, you can do this right away within the program by selecting the Create Alternative Translation command in the context menu available in the editor pane.
2. You can now add notes to segments. Previously, we would add a special mark and insert a note directly inside a segment. Now, it is possible to enter or edit a note for any segment in a dedicated pane. When you re-open a segment that includes a note, this note will appear in the pane. To find all segments with notes, press Ctrl+F to open the search window, deselect all options except In notes, and perform search with an empty string. Needless to say, this is a very useful and long-awaited feature, especially for a translation agency environment like ours where a translator and an editor use notes to communicate with each other regarding their choices and questions.
3. Another improvement is the ability to have project-specific file filters and segmentation rules. Prior to this version, you could only use one common set of filters and segmentation rules for all your projects, which was stored locally on your PC. In our case, this resulted in a problem each time a translator added a new segmentation rule to improve incorrect segmentation. Because the new rule was saved locally on this translator’s PC, opening this project on another PC, e.g. for editing, resulted in a different segmentation. Each time an editor had to either add the same rule manually or ask the translator to provide the segmentation rule file stored locally on this translator’s PC. Now, when adding a rule, you can make it project-specific by pressing Ctrl+E, selecting Segmentation and then Project-specific segmentation rules. The segmentation rule file will be saved to the omegat folder of this project. Whoever opens this project thereafter will get exactly the same segmentation based on the rules in this file. A further benefit of this improvement is that you can avoid automatic application of any rules set up in an older project to all new projects. Previously, all rules you once set up, however specific they might have been, continued to apply to all future projects, often ruining segmentation.
4. The last new feature I want to cover today is the improvement to the process of detecting changes in the external translation memories. Prior to 2.5.0, if you made any changes to, or added, any TMXs in the tm folder of your project, you needed to reload the project to be able to see the changes. This was particularly time-consuming with multiple large TMXs. Now, the program automatically detects any changes or additions in the tm folder. One benefit we’ve already derived from this improvement is an optimized process of sharing TMs between two or more translators working on the same project simultaneously. Previously, whenever one translator placed their current TM to the tm folder, they had to ask a colleague to reload the project to be able to see the latest translations added by that translator to the TM. Now, you simply place the TM to the tm folder, and the other translator sees it immediately without any notification or reloading.

In summary, the new version is a big hit with us. We truly appreciate the continued efforts the OmegaT developers are putting into this highly successful free open-source tool. If you are in need of a high-performance translation environment tool to boost the productivity and quality of your work, I strongly encourage you to try out this new version. For more information about OmegaT, please read other related blog posts. We’ll also continue reviewing the remaining new features in future posts.

As the first half of 2011 ended a few days ago, I decided to write a short post about some of the most exciting projects we worked on so far this year. In fact, many projects tended to be more technical, requiring intensive research and head-scratching. Working on some of them felt like digging ditches. While we undoubtedly welcome this kind of jobs, it is particularly pleasant to take a break once in a while and work on a different kind of project—one that you enjoy and have a feeling of ownership about. The two projects described below fell into this category.

Project 1: Translation Agency Website

We translated a corporate website for a major translation company from English into Russian. Some of the highlights include:

1. From beginning to end, we were inspired by the privilege to work on this project, because the client picked us from a huge pool of similar English to Russian translators. Their trust in us made us want to reciprocate in kind by delivering  a top-notch translation.
2. As a company deeply involved with the translation industry, it was easy for us to get the original message across and select appropriate Russian terminology such as “translation memory,” “DTP,” “fuzzy match.” The project provided a great opportunity to exercise our core principle: understand what you translate. When a translator knows and uses the right terminology, they feel strongly about their translation and have confidence that the final product is very good. This confidence and sense of ownership bring the feeling of self-fulfillment, which I think is especially treasured in our profession, because it is not always available.
3. Feeling honored to work on this project was also a great motivating force driving us to ensure the Russian copy was as fluent and creative as possible. With marketing texts, the main challenge is not conveying the meaning, but finding a good Russian equivalent, which may take much, much longer than a technical or general translation. In this project, it was our pleasure to invest a lot of time in writing and rewriting for perfection.

Project 2: Correspondence

Another rewarding experience was a translation of multiple emails and documents for a trial involving a witness who spoke only Russian. Some of the highlights include:

1. Although we work on this type of projects quite regularly, this one was truly special. Email by email, the project unfolded a story of a company, from startup to resignation of its CEO. Simply reading the source files was already a tremendous fun, especially because the facts were presented through informal emails written by the company’s staff in the course of their daily work.
2. This project also presented a unique combination of challenges:
   Volume. Facing the need to deliver a huge amount of emails and documents for the trial that was already underway, we had to beat all our previous turnaround records.
   Deadline. Although a very rush job tends to mess up your work-life balance, we enjoy a challenging deadline occasionally. We see it as an inspiring opportunity for solidifying our relationship with a client and also a chance to grow professionally.
   OCR. As the source files were uneditable, we had to recreate formatting from scratch and maintain a one-to-one layout in style and content of each page.
3. The client was happy with our work. They even gave us a tip, which is something we were very excited about, because we had never received any tips as a company!

I am sometimes asked about how Velior manages to maintain translation rates above the industry average in the highly competitive English to Russian language combination. I think the key to this is quality. You might say, “Wait a minute, you’ve just mentioned high competition, shouldn’t that drive quality across this combination?” You are right, of course, it should, but, judging by the translations I get to edit, it basically doesn’t. For this reason, a translator who puts quality first has a better chance of outdistancing competitors. So, which specific steps can you take to achieve this? From my experience as an editor who looked at several million translated words over the last five years, I can think of at least three main development areas for you to focus on:

1. Literal translation. Because English and Russian are extremely different, very few texts actually allow literal translation. In most cases, a literal translation is hard to read, unclear, and often ridiculous. Nevertheless, this kind of translation is commonplace in our combination. I hear two main explanations of why this happens, which both seem quite amusing to me. First, a translator often knows that the translation is poor, but just won’t do anything about it due to the lack of motivation, time, or skill. Second, many translators simply think this kind of translation will do, because they’ve always delivered this level of quality and got little or no feedback. Make it your job to never resort to literal translation, and you are on the fast lane on the road to success in your translation career!
2. Poor understanding of the source text. I strongly believe that understanding of the source text has a major impact on quality, but you might be surprised about how many translators think otherwise. It is not at all uncommon for people to translate without a clue as to what they are translating about. The bad news is that machine translation is evolving. One advantage of a human translator over MT is the ability to add value through better understanding of the text. Think about this: without this advantage, your translation becomes similar to MT output. As MT continues to evolve, human translators must invest more effort in understanding the text or be prepared to be put out of business. Change your direction today: instead of producing one vague translation after another, give more thought to what you write and look everything up on the Internet. Resolve to understand as much of the text as possible before committing it to your target segment.
3. Failure to use quality assurance tools. Although numerous tools, including free ApSIC Xbench and CheckMate, are available, many translations are delivered unchecked. In fact, one of our agency clients got so fed up with the errors, which can be easily detected automatically, that they put a special policy in place to discourage this kind of errors. This software became an integral part of our translation workflow long ago, since it improves quality and saves time otherwise spent on manual checks. Because I am so used to it now, I find it increasingly difficult to understand someone who doesn’t use translation environment tools on all or some of their projects. When I hear about this, my first thought is, “But this way you don’t get a bilingual text and can’t do automatic QA!” One of the best things about such tools is their simplicity—you can add them to your process easily and start benefiting from them almost immediately.

This post discusses translation challenges that involve words or phrases bearing a language-specific or culture-specific connotation, which cannot be easily rendered in the target text. Because a direct translation is undesirable or inappropriate, they require a more creative approach that considers context or audience. I will use examples (mainly from English to Russian translations) to generate a few ideas on how to approach some of this kind of challenges.

This city is not as huge as New York or even Los Angeles / Этот город не столь большой, как Москва или даже Санкт-Петербург

Here, both the challenge and the solution are simple. With the U.S. cities remaining in the translation, your comparison might not be immediately clear to your Russian-speaking audience. To avoid this, you can use similar Russian cities to get the message across.

SMART Goals / Цели SMART (Specific — конкретные, Measurable — измеримые, Attainable — достижимые, Realistic — реалистичные, Timely — с конкретным сроком)

This is a common word play challenge—acronym “SMART” has a dual meaning. In such cases, you can spend hours of time in search of a Russian equivalent to no avail. A more efficient option might be to keep the English acronym and translate each component in brackets. This way, the reader will be sure to understand the meaning of the acronym and might still enjoy the English word play. To make things easier, you can also provide a note explaining the nature of the word play.

Refer them to someone else who has the time—”No, but I’m sure Susan could help you with that“ / Учитесь направлять его к тому, кто располагает свободным временем: «Нет, но уверен, что в этом вам поможет Сьюзан»

Here, the choice whether to keep the English name, Susan, or replace it by a Russian name largely depends on context or audience.

It is important to consider the general feel of the text. In a text obviously coming from the English culture, a Russian name might feel alien. For this reason, in translations of fiction, the general tradition is to keep the proper names, even though they might be “eligible” for translation. For instance, one of the characters in Dombey and Son, Walter Gay (translation: Уолтер Гэй), is once humorously referred to as Walter Grave (Уолтер Грейв, not Уолтер Мрачный). This approach helps retain the original feel of the text. If you believe a translation will be also helpful, you can provide it as a note.

However, this approach isn’t universal. Where a text requires complete adaptation to the local audience needs, a direct translation might be more appropriate. Doing otherwise may signal that this text is a translation, causing your readers to smile or, even worse, frown, because this time it will be the English name that will feel alien.

In the above example taken from a training course designed for the Russian managers of a global company, I chose to keep the English name to retain the original cultural feel. Because the English language and culture are predominant in this company, the audience is likely to be okay with the English name.

A longer term strategy is to get a copy of The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, a simple guide to grammar / Более полезным в долгосрочной перспективе способом будет изучение книги The Elements of Style [...], которая представляет собой доступное руководство по грамматике. Эта книга предназначена для пишущих на английском языке; аналогичные руководства существуют и для русского языка

This sentence comes from a text about developing your writing skills. Although this text was originally written with English in mind, it also applies to Russian and can be translated successfully. This very sentence, however, refers to a guide that is specific to the English language. It is clearly of little use to the mainstream Russian-speaking audience. Moreover, it represents a risk of confusing the audience. You cannot simply omit the English title though, at least because some of the readers might still find it helpful (again, it is the question of understanding your audience). One method to handle such cases is to keep the English title in your translation, but add a note saying that this is an English-based guide, while similar Russian guides are also available. You can also go an extra mile by including the titles of such guides.

Der Kupplungsservo wandelt den [Pedalweg/pedalweg ] um… / Усилитель привода сцепления преобразует [Ход педали/ход педали]…

Included in a technical questionnaire (translated from German to Russian), this sentence offers a choice of two options in the square brackets. As you can see, the options are the same, save for the case. The difference is purely grammatical—the version with capitalization is the correct one, since the first letter of any German noun is capitalized. But how do you render the German grammatical nuance in Russian, which doesn’t require this type of capitalization? Originally, I couldn’t come up with a better solution than to simply keep the capitalization in translation. It is of course not quite meaningful, because the choice of options may seem ridiculous in Russian. I still think though that the question here is really not how to translate, but why translate at all—why translate into another language a question that is specifically intended to test the knowledge of German grammar?

I will be delighted to know how you approach this type of linguistic challenges in your translations. Please feel free to share what works for you and what doesn’t in similar situations.

P.S. It is also my pleasure to wish a happy New Year to all readers of this blog and our clients.