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

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.

The Funny and Sad Side of Translation

Here are a few poorly translated signs. They are pretty funny, but it does bring up the importance of translating and understanding the context of the text in question. You can't just translate strings of text without considering the structure of the phrase, or the context that goes with it. I don't think I would order "crap eggs".