Setting the industry standard in customer satisfaction
McElroy’s Mission Statement McElroy Translation provides translation and localization services in all languages to business and government clientele enhancing their ability to compete in global markets.
“Good business leaders create destiny by defining and sharing a vision. To know it, to feel it, and to live it is to achieve success.”
RAPS is having a webcast about Japan’s revised Pharmaceutical Affairs Law (PAL). This Webcast examines how JGMP requirements under Pharmaceutical Affairs Law (PAL) compare with ISO-13485 and other regulatory quality management system requirements.
French luxury goods group LVMH said on Wednesday it is looking into a report that a Chinese man has won patent approval for the Chinese translation of the Louis Vuitton brand.
Wang Jun, a businessman in the central city of Wuhan, had won the right to the brand name Lu Yi Wei Deng despite protests from Louis Vuitton, a local newspaper reported.
"Our legal department is looking at this," Janie Zhuang, a Louis Vuitton spokeswoman in Shanghai, said.
In this Washington Post article, the question is raised whether China has become increasingly more protectionist in its approach to investment, or if U.S. companies are simply using newer trade restrictions as excuses for not succeeding in the Chinese market. It's hard to tell, because the article offers up no basis of comparison to other burgeoning economies' openness to foreign investment. However, the brief commentary about a Chinese commercial that favors a Chinese search engine Baidu over Google is excellent food for thought.
In the Baidu commercial about Google, the Western man begins by saying "I know" repeatedly as he stands, smirking confidently, next to his bride-to-be. But after the Chinese man bursts on the scene and the two get into a war of words, the Westerner becomes confused. By mistake, he says, "I know I don't know that I don't know" -- at which point the disgusted bride runs away.
So the commercial is "not about nationalism and protectionism," Ji said. "It says that it's localization that gives success. If you localize services, it means you understand the people you are selling to."
Your company has just developed a new idea for a new product. The product has passed the research phase, which required a considerable investment of time, people and money. Your company has calculated the developmental cost and developed a promotion plan. You, the product manager, know that all of your carefully crafted marketing copy, originally written in English, will require translation into all of the languages spoken in your company’s international target markets. Even though you fully understand the importance of this, the process of new product development has consumed all of your time. You’ve started the countdown for the release date of the new product and then you suddenly remember, “ooops, I forgot to translate the marketing and product information!”
How many languages were there again...? 10? 12? 21?
You are confident that your translation vendor will be able to complete all of the necessary translations in time—after all, there are only a few documents that need to be translated. So, you call your translation vendor’s account representative, and she tells you that it will take at least two weeks to complete the entire translation. “Why!?” you ask.
She tells you that those few documents you sent her contain approximately 20K words, and your project will require extensive rewrites due to its heavy use of marketing jargon. You don’t understand—how is it possible? You decide to call a few other translation vendors, and they give you the same answer. You start to panic because it looks like the product will not be released on time, and you are going to be responsible for the delay.
Shall we rewind?
Let’s rewind this potential nightmare and see if you could have a less stressful time dealing with THOSE translations. Below you will find a step by step guide to a stress free translation project into multiple languages.
Let’s say you have a 20K word marketing project. A translator can translate, on average, 1500 words/day. This will require 13 working days for the translation itself. Add an additional 2-3 days for editing. Include at least one business day for project management and QA. For a translation project of this size and type, allow for at least 17 business days. Of course, each project is unique and requires an individual analysis.
Start thinking ahead. Translation is performed by humans and they will need some real time to work on your project. Note the formula at the right to see how the size of the projects affects the delivery.
Write your copy with an international audience in mind. Have your technical and marketing writers create copy that has consistent terminology and avoids complicated sentence structure. Translators will be able to finish your project in an accurate, timely fashion if the meaning you are trying to convey is clear.
Involve your translation vendor at the first stages of the project. Contact your translation vendor as soon as you know some translation will be involved in your project and give her the approximate date of the release, the target locales, the anticipated volume of words, etc. The more detailed information you can provide about the project, the better she can help you.
Further ways to lower your stress level at translation time include:
Maintain all of the editable files in easily accessible, logical directory trees, and keep track of who authored and revised the content. Web help content, for instance, cannot be optimally translated if your translation vendor only has a website URL to retrieve it from. Likewise, PDFs cannot be optimally edited or translated without the original source files from which they were created. Do you want to find yourself at the end of a project on the phone with your web and technical documentation team trying to track down HTML and Quark files?
Keep track of all of the artwork and its editable versions in a similar fashion, especially the ones that contain text. The same rule applies here. If your translation vendor has to re-create graphics from scratch because you can’t find the original Illustrator files, this will add considerable time and money to your project.
For reference purposes and ensuring terminology consistency in the translation, maintain a glossary of specific terms that your company internally uses. While your translation vendor should have specific subject matter experts available for your project, who thoroughly know your industry’s terminology, if you have acronyms and terms specific to your product offerings, these may require translation and explanation to your international audiences.
If you plan on requesting an in country review (i.e., an independent review by one of your regional offices, for instance) post-translation, begin planning for it at the start of the project, as it will affect the time needed for the project to be completed. Of course, let your translation vendor know you intend to have the content independently reviewed.
Don’t send the draft of your documents—wait until the final version is available. This saves you money and time!
Remember that it is possible to assemble a team of multiple translators for big projects to shave days off of the turnaround time—but the consistency of the translation increasingly deteriorates with each additional translator put on a project.
For large projects we recommend you develop a translation glossary—before submitting the final version of your content for translation, create a list of key words and phrases to be translated first, and then ask your regional offices to review the glossary. This procedure alone could save you a lot of time in the long run, and allows the regional offices to have input into the process at the beginning.
Obviously, this is a general list that can be applied to a variety of projects where multilingual content is a necessity. Each individual project, especially a larger, time-consuming one, will have its unique problems, goals and criteria that will allow for modification and customization of this list to meet those specific needs.
I hope that this list will help you make your next project less stressful, and help you plan for a successful international product launch. If the best of plans go awry and circumstances beyond your control create a scenario that is less than ideal, at least you have good information to understand the challenges that you and your vendor will face. I am here to answer any further questions you may have and ensure your success with projects of all shapes and sizes. (
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Less than 3 percent of all books published in English worldwide are translations, according to a leading publishing database. In the United States, just a fraction of the titles that make it into English are translations of foreign novels, short stories, or poetry.
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"It was clear that Americans did need and want to know more about the realities of the rest of the world, not just the abstractions that are flung around in political discourse," says Mason.
The nonprofit site, now in its fourth year, offers contemporary writing from places such as Argentina, China, Italy, and Pakistan, often for the first time in English. It gets about 200,000 page views per month and counts roughly 8,000 subscribers, more than one-quarter of whom live in the US. (Some subscribers choose to pay a fee, but anyone can access the content for free.) Last fall, the organization published its first print anthology of works from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria titled – what else? – "Literature from the 'Axis of Evil' and Other Enemy Nations" (The New Press, 2006), now in its third printing.
McElroy embraces “plain language” in all that we do. We may not be perfect but we are focused on continued communication improvements. We want to speak plainly to our clients as we telephone, email, and compose our marketing and educational materials. For our clients plain language benefits are leveraged across languages when they translate their communications; “plain language” makes even more dollars and sense.
On The Web (TCW): Most technical communicators and web content creators have yet to embrace Plain Language, but Haller expects that to change. “We’re seeing an increasing interest from organizations that understand the benefits of clear, concise communication. Plain Language can provide many usability benefits, but it can also help improve translation efforts, drastically reducing translation costs.”
Desktop publishing impacts all written content produced in print and online. In its simplest form, DTP (desktop publishing) comes into play every day when choosing typography, colors, margins, line spacing, backgrounds, tables, images, etc., in document, email and even online formats. However, desktop publishing is most commonly associated with layout programs that produce print-ready files for magazines, marketing collateral, packaging, manuals, business and legal documents, and large-sized print media.
Even online format developers need to have some DTP skills in order to design websites and online applications. Between the two, this encompasses much of the written content produced. A translation vendor that has the staff and know-how to balance DTP considerations with translation functions can save you time and energy as well as help you avoid common cross-cultural pitfalls and make the best presentation of your company’s image.
This article didn't receive much attention anywhere else, but I think it signifies a great change in how companies in the U.S. should approach their Hispanic marketing and advertising.
The shift in Central Texas demographics — as more Spanish-speaking residents move into the area — is reverberating over the radio airwaves.
Austin's Spanish-language radio station La Ley (98.9 FM) is celebrating the most recent Arbitron radio ratings: It scored a 6.4 rating among all listeners ages 12 and up, making it, by that measure, the top radio outlet in the Austin market for the fall 2006 period.
A global community of healthcare specialists and information scientists, the HL7 organization aims to create standards--including HL7--to aid in the exchange, management and integration of electronic data between information systems that implement healthcare applications.
For instance, information recorded in English by an English-speaking healthcare provider can leverage on these healthcare standards and have the data translated into the Chinese language, which can then be read and understood by a Chinese-speaking patient, he explained.
I wonder if any U.S. companies who advertise on MySpace see the potential in localizing their product offerings and advertisements for these new markets? Judging from the international fare already offered by MySpace, the answer appears to be "no." MySpace itself doesn't appear to have made much of an effort to deliver a truly localized experience to its international users. Cyworld, which is the MySpace equivalent in Korea, appears to have already gotten a toehold into the Chinese market.
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About a third of MySpace's 90 million global unique visitors in December 2006 were from international markets, according to comScore Media Metrix data.
Translation E-Buzz
