Professional translation services or individual translators? You decide

If your company is thinking of using an individual translator rather than a professional language service provider (LSP), consider some of the advantages of using a professional translation company before taking that next step.

• Although individual translators can sometimes offer better prices, a professional translation company can offer competitive prices while still ensuring quality.
• Professional LSPs may be more likely to provide free trial translations to help you gauge the level of quality of their finished worked product.
• A professional translation firm is far more likely to have set standards for the skills their translation and other company employees must have, as well as criteria for hiring.
• Unlike individual translators who may or may not have experience in a given discipline, professional translation services will typically offer subject matter expertise in a much broader range of specialities, such as automobile manufacturing, medical content, and telecommunications.
• Because of their more extensive experience and body of work, LSPs usually have comprehensive glossaries and terminology lists as well as the experience in ensuring consistency of terminology across a wide range of documents and outputs.
• For any translation work, a critical component to success is good project management and a standard translation process. Professional translation companies have the background in refining their processes to take into account best practices and are able to successfully manage and deliver projects that meet customer requirements, on time and with quality.
• Finally, a professional translation company should have the financial resources to ensure their work product and to invest in sophisticated translation memory tools that can help your company save time and money, project after project, by reusing translated content.

ICD is Moving Soon

ICD will be moving its headquarters from Milwaukee to Brookfield, WI. We'll be moving to a larger more advanced facility in an effort to expand our presence in the industry. Our new address will be posted soon. I'll also post some pictures of our new facility once it's ready.

Photos form Recent Shows in Milwaukee, Chicago, and Las Vegas

Here are recent photos from Trade Shows where ICD was an exhibitor.

MWTA Trade Days: Milwaukee

ASTD: Chicago

AEM Exhibitor Education Meeting: Las Vegas

It's Official! ICD is a certified Woman-Owned Business

PRESS RELEASE

CERTIFIED WOMAN-OWNED BUSINESS

DATE:  April 14^th, 2010

CONTACT: Catherine Deschamps-Potter

TITLE: Vice-President

INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATION BY DESIGN, INC.

State Certified as a Woman-Owned Business Enterprise

International Communication by Design, Inc. has received certification as a Woman-Owned Business Enterprise (WBE) through the State of Wisconsin Department of Commerce. The designation is pursuant to the state administrative rule requirements of Comm 104 which provides validation that International Communication by Design, Inc. meets the requirements of being at least 51 percent woman-owned, controlled and managed. It qualifies International Communication by Design, Inc. to be considered for contracts with corporations and government entities that seek vendor relationships with businesses owned and operated by women.

International Communication by Design, Inc. was established in 1991 and specializes in Language Translation and Localization. To better promote state certified WBE’s and to make it easy for buyers to find them, the Department of Commerce maintains an on-line WBE Directory at http://commerce.wi.gov/BD/BD-WBECertification.html).

Changing the Game

The recession has forced many translation companies to re-think their sales and service approach. The price for translation is a never ending bottom line battle, and companies have to choose to either make less money while providing the same level of quality, or come up with added services at no-cost to justify their prices.

No doubt new technologies have been developed to help the industry move forward as a whole. Machine Translation and Editing by human translators is one service that many translation companies have chosen to offer. It's sort of a budget version translation. A compromise in cost. The quality is probably a B, and that's enough for most instructional manual. The problem here is finding a good translator to edit a machine translation.

Other translation companies have started offering services like 24 hr instant translation. Naturally, they probably use a machine because it's going to be pretty hard to have a translator work on-call for them. There's one company that goes as far as offering a hotline for "translation emergencies". This is a great idea on paper, but when is translation really an emergency. Even if it is, I doubt that a 100 pages can be done in less than 1 day. The hotline does work as a tool for client's to find out the progress of their projects, or to inquire about the completion date.

Overall, we have to adapt to the changing economic climate to satisfy our clients needs. We may have to streamline the process, and offer more competitive prices, or justify the current prices with added services. There is a value attached to every dollar, and we must remember that there is a value attached to a good translation.

Facebook's Human Translation

Facebook introduced non-English languages for the first time in January 2008. Now about 70 percent of Facebook's 300 million users are outside of the United States. Many bloggers and tech writers think Facebook's method of human translation seems promising as it combines real people behind the scenes as opposed to machine translation.

Basically, users suggest translated phrases and vote on translations that others have submitted. These crowd-sourced edits, which work sort of like Wikipedia make Facebook's translation service smarter over time. Go to Facebook's translation page to check it out or to participate.

More than 65 languages function on Facebook now, according to Facebook's statistics. At least another 30 languages are in the works, meaning Facebook needs help working out the kinks on those languages before they're put to use.

What's new? Facebook announced in a blog post on September 30 that the social network has made its crowd-sourced translation technology available to other sites on the Web. The update allows sites to install a translation gadget on their sites through Facebook Connect, a service that lets Facebook users sign in on other Web pages.

Facebook also added some new languages, including Latin and "Pirate," which translates the Facebooky word "share" as "blabber t'yer mates!"

People are good at knowing idioms and slang, so Facebook tends to get these right, but there are limited numbers of multi-lingual volunteers who want to spend time helping Facebook translate things. Also, Facebook's site is available in many languages, but its human translators don't touch wall posts, photo comments and other user-submitted items, which is a big con if you want to have friends who don't share a common language with you.

Source: CNN.com

A Tough Sell

Jeff Jorgensen, National Accounts Manager at ICD wrote an article for the August '09 issue of World Trade Magazine. The article titled: "Talk About a Tough Sell," emphasizes the important need to consider quality translations in today's marketplace. Most companies are looking at their bottom line in the economic downturn, but it's also important to consider liability issue when it comes to poorly translated material, and cost shouldn't out way quality. This article is a must read for anyone considering translations or debating the cost versus quality issue. You can download a PDF version of the article here

Trados Limitations and Textboxes

This week I've learned that I hate embedded and grouped text boxes in Word. Why do I hate them? Well, Trados apparently does not pick up text that are embedded in text boxes when you attempt to translate the file in a tagged word format. If you use Tag Editor it hides the text between formatting tags, and the text in the boxes are not editable. Solution, SDLX actually picks up the text for text boxes that are grouped, but it ignores embedded boxes. By the way, text in embedded boxes show up as live text, they don't get picked by SDLX, and there is no option to have it pick up or extract the text. Therefore, the best was is to try and copy and paste the text into a word file, ignoring the boxes and hoping you copied and pasted all the text correctly. So, if you must use Trados, be careful of the grouped and embedded text boxes, you'll be missing a few words if you don't.

Corporate Wisconsin Article

The blog is not dead. I've just been busy. I apologize for the lack of posts last month. To kick things off, Catherine wrote an article for Corporate Wisconsin. You can read it here. It's actually on the main page of their website under the "My View" column. It's an interesting article that provides some ideas on the current export climate for businesses.

Answering the Need for Translation

The question: Should I translate my website and my marketing material? arises every time a company explores venturing into a new market. Is the cost of translating and localizing marketing collateral going to pay off with market share in the future? is another question that looms over the heads of International Sales people in their attempt to justify their translation budgets for their material. This article, written by Don DePalma, covers some important things to factor in when considering translating and localizing content from marketing collateral to user interfaces and online help. Here's an excerpt from the article that I think address the questions above. Read the full article here


Excerpt: Global Strategies: Watch Your Language

Written by Don DePalma

Monday, 01 June 2009

Buyers want products they can understand
This need to localize isn’t unique to consumer products; it crosses a wide range of goods and services. At Common Sense Advisory, we have long tracked this product requirement. In 2006, we asked 2,430 consumers in eight non-English-speaking countries about their language and usage preferences for Web sites. The answer was unequivocal: they wanted information, user interfaces, and payment methods that they could read, use, and understand, not English.

More recently, we extended this inquiry to corporate software buyers, both the kind you use on your desktop at work and the heavy-duty enterprise solutions that power supply chains, financial institutions, and corporate operations. This time, we asked 351 buyers in eight non-Anglophone countries about their buying preferences.

We think this survey has broader implications for global sales and should be interesting even if you don’t buy or sell software. Think about the things you do buy or sell. They are marketed either online, in-person, or in the mass media, so the marketers have to attract the prospective buyers’ attention in selling propositions that make sense to them.

Think office equipment, machine tools, anything you might drive or fly, medical devices, and a bunch of other gear. Then consider what makes up these products. Each has an electronic user interface, comes with lots of documentation, and may require post-sales technical support. In many ways, from initial marketing to post-sales support, these products are similar to software.

To measure the localization requirements for business products, we selected a cross-section of countries around the world, aiming for a representative mix of markets for which companies frequently adapt their products (France, Germany, Japan, and Spain), attractive developing markets (China and Russia), and locales for which English is often thought to be sufficient for most offerings (Sweden).

Global TM

This week ICD started tweeting, and we started to follow Renato Beninatto, famed translation industry expert and President of Common Sense Advisory. He tweeted about the future of the Global TM (Translation Memory). Basically, it's the idea of combining multiple translation memories from different vendors and create a shared TM. Access can be granted to both vendors and clients who agree to share their memories. Now, that sounds like it should bring about fair market competition between translation companies. For example: If translation company A and B are bidding on the same project they would have the same competitive edge when it comes to the translated content, but the winning bid would come down to the translators cost. That's when the problem arises for translators. The price war has already begun, and with a global TM, translators will have to beat each other based on prices because that becomes the sole variable for translation cost. Then the question of quality becomes an issue.

The other problem arises with proprietary content. TMs are the clients proprietary material, and if they entered into an agreement for a Global TM, then their translated materials would be shared with their competitors. I'm not sure how this will effect instruction manuals, but it could be a problem for marketing literature with catchy tag lines and phrases. You certainly don't want your prized tag line that your marketing gurus spent hours coming up with duplicated or beaten by a competing company. It only takes a couple words to have a best seller.

Will the Global TM succeed? Maybe, if limits are placed on the exchange of translated content, and on access provided to companies that agree to share their memories. Smaller translation companies will also feel the pain as they will be less competitive if they don't participate in the Global TM.

Interview with Catherine Potter

This is an interview with Catherine Potter. She gives her insights and perspective on this year's STC conference.

Photos from the 56th Annual STC Conference

As promised, here are a few pictures from the 56th Annual STC Conference that was held in Atlanta, GA. Catherine, Ann, and I had a great time meeting people, and seeing the sights in Atlanta. We met some interesting exhibitors including the creators of Guimags. A bright idea that allows designers to save time and money by creating their layouts on a board with customized magnets. It also eases the UI testing process with a more interactive experience. Check them out. Overall, the conference was geared more towards writing content in the new age of blog, wikis, and twitter. There was less of a focus on translation and localization even though the majority of the exhibitors were translation companies.

Mobile Blogging Failed, STC Conference Day 2

Well, the mobile blogging idea failed. I didn't have the patience to key in every single word with my not smartphone phone. I should get an Iphone if I want to seriously mobile blog. Yesterday, Catherine and I arrived in Atlanta, and we had to set up our booth. The new booth looks awesome, pictures to come. Now, I'm sitting in a session about blogging and using wikis and blogging about it. Hilarious. Anyway, the blogging aspect wasn't anything new, but the info on wiki's is pretty neat. The speaker is explaining the whole wiki process: setting it up, expanding it, and updating. ICD is considering creating a wiki to update our clients on what's going on with their projects. Twitter would work, but no one seems to think it's very professional. "Wiki Wars" the speaker just said that. Apparently, it happens. People battle it out to see what's actually "true" content. I know, I went off on a tangent. Ok, back to wikis.

The speaker is a writer for Floss manuals, and they use the wiki they created to run book sprints. Book Sprints are a collaborative writing effort to create a book or manual in a short period of time. One option is to use the wiki as a collaborative writing community like a writers block, but on an online community where things can be debated, edited and changed all at the same time. Floss Manuals was able to create a manual for Firefox users in 5 days, and it was a collaborative effort with Mozilla developers. That's pretty quick. There's so much out there in the online community, that people are starting to make business connections and promote their services through the internet. In order to succeed though, you have to be able to utilize the internet effectively, and manage and update your blogs, and wikis so people continue to follow your posts and stay connected.

How Language Crashed a Plane?

I was watching CNN this morning and they were talking about a new book (I don't remember the title), but it was about language and education and how cultural barriers are being broken. As they were talking, one of the highlights appeared on the bottom of the screen: "How Language Crashed a Plane?" That immediately caught my attention, and I listened intensely to the reporting. Apparently, there was a plane crash involving a Korean Airlines flight a few years ago (I tried searching for the story, but it seems Korean Air has a checkered history of airplane crashes and problems, and there were countless crashes. They've improved since the late 90's though. I was on a Korean Airlines flight last October, and it was actually really nice, service was great, all the booze you can drink etc.) Anyway, the reason this particular plane crashed was due to a disagreement between the pilot and co-pilot on the way to solve a problem with landing the plane, and to make matters worse there was a disagreement with ground control in Korea. This all stemmed from their communications in Korean because Korean is a hierarchical language where honorifics and speech level play and important part in grammar and verbiage used between conversations of people with different status. By status I mean either ones job position, age, and education level.

Allegedly, there was verbiage and tone that was incorrectly used between the co-pilot (lower status), and the pilot (higher status) as they disputed ideas to solve the problem they were encountering. This created an argument, and when the ground control officer got involved it elevated the communication breakdown that had occurred between the pilot and co-pilot. The language hierarchical problem that occurred was a costly life-ending event for Korean Airlines and since that incident, they have enforced the use of English for all instructions and commands on their airplanes. This lesson serves as an important factor when considering the use of language. When you get something translated, quality matters. You need to consider cultural aspect and important tone and verb usage. It's important to understand the culture, and experienced high quality translators are able to understand the culture, and translate appropriately.