An American e-commerce and cloud computing company with a well-known international trademark approached Future Trans, one of the world’s most experienced localization and translation vendors to handle a tough situation the company was going through. The client’s requirements seemed quite impossible to meet, but Future Trans managed to deliver the project on time and to an astonishingly quality.
Project Summary:
- Client: American e-commerce and cloud computing company with a well-known international trademark.
- Service: Localization from German and English into Arabic and Turkish.
- Discipline: e-commerce
- Volume: 1.5 million words.
- Timeframe: 30 days.
- Work Level: Highest level (localizing a huge number of products names and descriptions from German and English into Arabic and Turkish).
Challenges:
- Dedicating enough staff members to cover the work as the client had a huge number of products names and descriptions, totalling 1.5 million words that needed to be localized from German and English into Arabic and Turkish.
- Providing language expertise in a wide range of languages to deal with the client’s source languages and target languages (German, English. Arabic and Turkish).
- Providing subject expertise resources across a wide range of disciplines for the localization of very technical content and for conducting the required extensive research needed.
- Maintaining terminology consistency throughout the texts as having multiple translators from multiple disciplines working on the translation required a customized and well-planned system so as to ensure the consistency of the overall translation output.
- Meeting the deadline, which was very tight, considering the volume of work entailed; the client asked for the project to be delivered within one month.
- Reaching a financial agreement; due to the long-term relationship with the client, he requested a special rate because of the huge volume of this project and expectations of future projects.
How did Future Trans overcome the challenges?
- Assigning multiple translators and editors with extensive proven experience, as the subject areas were varied what disabled us to have a single resource working on the project. To meet our client’s objectives and complete the project in 30 days without sacrificing the quality, our best resources were assigned to the task with all the tools available for accomplishing the project in the most efficient way.
- Using our self-developed Translation Management System (TMS) to allow all the resources to work together using a shared Translation Memory (TM), with the reviewer working alongside them, also, to get the best use of our time and effort. Our TMS, which is a full-fledged platform, enabled them to consolidate all regular phases of the translation process, and made it relatively easy to create multiple translation projects, analyze files and make them ready for translation, retrieve project-specific translation memories and glossaries, and assign translators, reviewers, proofreaders and the rest of the translation team.
- Implementing a strong Project Management System, where the PM ensured that all timelines for each and every file were met and that our translators were on track with their assignments. The managers coordinated with all the translators and kept them on the same page with respect to client expectations and quality performance. Specific quality measures were implemented in-house to ensure consistency across the work of the different translators.
- Building a strong communication channel between our in-house translators, checkers, native checkers and client to get real-time feedback and keep the client involved at all stages of work.
How did Future Trans help?
Once the project execution was awarded to us, Future Trans project managers held a succession of meetings to tailor and set the right plan for running the project. The plan was as follows:
- Assigning one focal point to communicate with the client for the best results.
- Created a style guide, terminology checklist and a glossary to get leverage from our own developed TMS technology, which allowed us to assign a massive number of resources, all sharing Translation Memory, and, thus, maintaining consistency across these resources and saving time. Overcoming the challenge of converting the currencies and measurement units, as per the client’s request, by assigning all available resources, especially those who had previous experience with e-commerce platforms to apply the correct conversions.
- Handling the challenge related to localizing the content while keeping the marketing tone, as the whole content was centred on the description, specifications and benefits of the products, so we made sure to assign the resources who had a marketing background to add value to the target content.
- Dividing and distributing the files across many different resources while keeping them connected.
- Dividing the project into partial deliveries with different deadlines.
- Implementing QA check process and validating final deliveries.
Accomplishments:
Future Trans completed the task successfully. We localized 1.5 million words in 30 days with a limited budget, which left our client so impressed with the accuracy and quality of our work and we were nominated to be the main vendor for most of his projects.
Because of our commitment in this project, we ranked higher among many other vendors for various parameters, like quality, productivity, and client servicing; yet we’re still refining our processes further, in order to bring our clients the best and to always exceed their expectations.
