Velior's Corporate Blog about Translation and Translation Industry

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

Thinking Translation Doesn’t Matter

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

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

General Electric’s Acquisition

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

Russian to English Localization

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

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

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

Summary

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

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

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

Approaching Translation from Marketing Perspective

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

Saving Pennies while Losing Thousands

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

This post is continued in part 2.

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.

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!

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 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.

Tight deadlines are quite common in the translation industry. The reasons behind them certainly vary and are generally justified such as an urgent need for translation because a delivery truck is detained at the border due to an untranslated bill of lading. However, my experience with English to Russian translation suggests that deadlines sometimes might be unreasonably short. For instance, there have been situations when we were given just 2 days to translate about 6,000 words (while the industry average is arguably 2,000 words per day) and then waited for weeks before the typeset or reviewed files arrived. Another example is website localisation: given the complexity of the process, especially when multiple languages are involved, it is a quite lengthy process. I occasionally check with the sites we translated recently to see whether our translation was made available correctly, and from what I have seen so far, the average time between translation delivery and publication is around three months. Meanwhile, the time provided for the translation step of the process is typically just a few days or weeks, i.e. disproportionately short. It is therefore our experience that reasonable deadlines are in fact possible in many cases, and in the final analysis, they are beneficial to both clients and translators. This post is intended to discuss some of the reasons in support of this belief.

1. For me, quality has always been the most important reason. Translation is not a pizza delivery that can be sped up by simply asking the delivery man to ride faster and straight to your home, skipping other clients on the route. A translator can hardly shift into a higher gear without sacrificing quality. In particular, pressuring translators to deliver faster than they normally would leads to incorrect understanding of the source text, less attention to detail, reduced editing and proofreading time, which all add up resulting in lower quality. If you want a high-quality translation, it is recommended to let the translator establish a deadline they find reasonable to do a good job.
2. We normally add a certain percentage of time to each quoted deadline to account for potential delay risks such as a translator getting sick, power outage, or hardware failure. Obviously, when such risk occurs while you are translating urgently (and therefore have no “just-to-be-on-the-safe-side” time), you are bound to miss the deadline. And no matter how pressing the deadline was, this will still damage your reputation. In other words, the risk of late delivery, hence reputation damage, is much higher with the tight deadlines.
3. Velior is usually likely to provide discounts for jobs with longer deadlines, as they increase our flexibility by enabling long-term planning and handling other jobs within the same time frame. The results are reduced downtime and higher efficiency which can be normally reflected in a discount to recognise and encourage the client’s flexibility.
4. As a company, we also need to develop new translation talent, including graduates and interns. Involving them in actual jobs at the translation step (of course such translations are subject to thorough editing) is an important part of their individual development plan. Tight deadlines greatly reduce such on-the-job training opportunities, as these translators need more time than the seasoned ones. This may hinder talent development to a certain extent, which in a long run may have a negative impact on the entire industry.

In addition to a reasonable deadline, a translation can also benefit from a higher price. You can read why in this post.