McElroy gives back

Lisa Siciliani

McElroy Donates $500 to the ASPCA

We have received several responses to our question asking for your favorite charity. Many were for animal protection organizations, so this month, that’s the cause McElroy is supporting with a donation of $500. All of the organizations suggested are excellent so a decision was very tough! We hope that all of those who voiced support for a different animal protection organization will find merit in this one as well.

Who the ASPCA is:

Founded in 1866, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) was the first humane organization established in the Western Hemisphere and today has one million supporters. The ASPCA’s mission is to provide effective means for the prevention of cruelty to animals throughout the United States. The ASPCA provides national leadership in anti-cruelty, animal behavior, humane education, government affairs and public policy, shelter support, and animal poison control. The Humane Law Enforcement department is featured on the reality television series Animal Precinct on Animal Planet.

Please consider donating to an animal protection organization, or adopting an animal from a shelter or rescue organization. And if you have a great animal rescue story you’d like to tell, please write me at lisa@mcelroytranslation.com.

Want to read some cool statistics about Industry Statistics & Trends? According to the 2007-2008 National Pet Owners Survey, 63% of U.S. households own a pet, which equates to 71.1 million homes. 162 million of these pets are dogs and cats, but you might be surprised to read how many other types of pets there are! And they aren’t even including pet chickens, ducks, sheep, cows, goats, and so on and so forth …

Contact Lisa Siciliani to learn more about McElroy Gives Back or to make a suggestion for a future charity to be featured in this section.

Read case studies to learn more about McElroy’s DTP and localization solutions.

A case for case studies

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“A recent government publication on the marketing of cabbage contains, according to one report, 26,941 words. It is noteworthy in this regard that the Gettysburg Address contains a mere 279 words while the Lord’s Prayer comprises but 67.”
- Norman R. Augustine

Where to begin? You need a good story to tell and a customer who understands the benefits of sharing the spotlight with you and is willing to provide information. Flesh out the story in three parts:

1) The challenge: Set the scene, introduce the characters, and present the problem.

2) The solution: Enter protagonist.

3) The result: How did the solution work? What change did it bring?

The case study should be straightforward and factual. A supporting metric which establishes return on investment is optimal. How long did it take the solution to pay for itself and how did it do it?

Your client will help you define the end user. Who in their business setting is the ultimate user of your service or product? They will also help you articulate the business problem and elaborate on the results of your solution.

“You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.”

Anthony de Mello, from One Minute Wisdom

If case studies can be created in the framework of these three simple steps why are so few organizations prolific in this domain? With no need to point outward I can readily attest that support for case study initiatives has been the #1 challenge for McElroy’s Marketing Manager Lisa Siciliani. The Marketing Department relies on information and data from two sets of very busy people, internal McElroy employees and external McElroy clients.

Writing a case study is the easy part; collecting the information and understanding the full story is the challenge. It is a process which requires the cooperation of an organization’s most prized asset, its customers. In McElroy’s case the delivery of the translated or localized product usually marks only the beginning of a lengthy process client-side that will later determine the value of the puzzle piece that McElroy provided. Our translations may support litigation efforts than can continue at length before parties mediate or go to trial. They may be compiled into an FDA submission for which approvals take time. Or, they may support a global product launch or training effort for which specific results take time to quantify.

The challenge is not telling the story, but knowing the story. In our case we must

l) learn of its potential to solve problems despite the fact that we, McElroy and client, work aggressively in the moment focused on delivering quality and meeting deadlines, then

2) follow the story through to its ultimate conclusion.

“It can seem incredibly daunting to be faced with the process of ferreting out the best stories for case studies, but once they are unearthed and brought to light, both vendor and client have pure PR gold on their hands.”

Lisa Siciliani, Marketing Manager at McElroy Translation

Lisa’s ongoing encouragement to work diligently on case studies has recently gained momentum under the directive of McElroy’s newly retained PR firm Petras and Associates. An abundance of research on buying trends indicates that overcoming the inherent challenges of documenting case studies must be a corporate priority. If this also applies to your business, what strategies are available to make this happen?

Assume the Attitude!

Case studies aside, when client facing contacts see their role as problem solvers and business consultants they do more than “take orders.” They will learn about a client’s specific situation and needs in the process of everday client communication. This information may signal the foundation of a good story.

Respect Your Client’s Time!

Take as little of your client’s time as possible! Rely on internal employees to document process solutions and do your own research on support information if necessary. Write the bulk of the study and only approach the client with a brief telephone or email interview to add local flavor and possibly insert a quote. Get a sign off on the final product and do not expect the client to participate in the draft and revision process. Submit only a finished product for approval.

Speaking of Approvals…

Include corporate communications early in the process. These are the people in the client’s organization who fully understand how the resulting case study can be a tool for their own public relations. Plus, there will be no surprises at the approval stage.

Future Chapters

Create a storytelling workplace. Gather and tell stories now for specific marketing use. But share these stories as much as possible internally and promote inquisitiveness. At McElroy I know that our line staff members feel more vested in the work that they process when they understand how it fits in to our clients’ business scenarios. Think long term and stay tuned to client side plots that continue to unfold, creating new chapters and spin-offs for years to come.

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself. ”
Peter Drucker

“And thereby hangs a tale.”

William Shakespeare, in As You Like It      

McElroy Translation adheres to and promotes the ASTM International Standard Guide for Quality Assurance

German

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Do you know examples where translation or localization mistakes have occurred with this language, such as problems with text expansion, date/time formats, counting errors, character encoding, etc., or mistakes with the translation itself?

In an average year, I edit/review anywhere between half a million and one million words. These projects are assigned to me by a number of translation agencies—on average, I accept projects from about 30 agencies a year, and about 80 percent of those projects come from about 30% of those agencies. Not surprisingly, those 10 or so agencies are my favorite clients; without exception, they have comprehensive translator selection and quality assurance processes in place, and accepting editing projects from them is relatively risk-free.

For business reasons, however, I also accept occasional reviewing assignments from a host of other agencies with less exacting quality standards, and in the past, I have encountered just about all the problems mentioned in your question. Two recent examples come to mind:

I was asked to edit a 20,000+ word brochure by an organization dedicated to educating consumers about timber native to the western US. The brochure was highly technical in nature; it offered descriptions of timber grades and standards and provided detailed descriptions of the criteria for each grade.

The project was completed on a tight schedule, and I was given a total of 12 hours to complete the edit. Any time extension was out of the question. Upon asking about the identity of the translator, I was told she was extremely qualified with experience in that particular field. Plus, she was an ATA accredited translator, and I should expect to make small, stylistic changes only. I did not know the translator by name, but accepted the assignment based on the assurances I received from the agency.

Unfortunately, the translation was of a very poor quality and required substantial revisions. The chosen style was inappropriate for its intended purpose and readership, and—more importantly—the terminology was frequently wrong, which I determined by spot-checking a few terms early on in the revision process. I contacted the agency to inform them of my concerns and to point out to them that I would need more time to do a proper job as the editor. I was told to do the best I could; no additional time could be granted.

Needless to say, despite my efforts at improving the translation, this project was delivered in a somewhat unfinished state. I was unable to verify all the chosen terminology, and I am convinced that the translation was seriously flawed—a fact that the end customer was most likely not informed of.

While this translation may have been created by a “professional translator,” it was not created by a translator competent in the field she was working in, and it was produced under unacceptable time pressure.

Another example: I was asked to edit a relatively short translation of descriptions of print advertisements for a large IT manufacturer. The German text read as though it was produced by either a non-native speaker with an above-average command of German or a native German speaker who was somewhat out of touch with his/her native language. The translation was both too colloquial and terminologically flawed. (A particularly annoying mistake was the consistent translation of the term advertisement with “Werbung,” which refers to a TV/radio commercial, but not to a print ad.) Had the translation not been edited, it would have been completely unacceptable to the end client.

One comment regarding text expansion: that’s an issue I run into all the time, especially with one particular client who produces software for printing equipment. I am usually allowed as many characters for German as there are for the English source word, which leads to almost comical efforts on my part to find shorter substitutes or to abbreviate the only available terms. Ex.: press (as in an offset press) is “Druckmaschine” in German, and there really are no substitutes. Thus a 5 letter word in English becomes a 13 letter word in German, and I usually have no choice but to create a strange acronym such as “Drckm.” Professional translators complain about this problem all the time, and many of them are engaged in intense client education efforts to convince the authors of such software to allow for a certain expansion factor in other languages.

Relate an example or two where you found a website page or form difficult to use because it was poorly localized into your language/locale. How might a business lose money, prestige or incur legal risk due to this bad translation?

All modern translators engage in web research in order to properly prepare for technical/scientific translations. To me, the Internet has become an invaluable resource, specifically in new and rapidly developing fields where printed dictionaries cannot possibly keep up with frequent changes and discoveries.

While conducting research in such areas, I have in the past frequently come across web sites originating in the US or other countries, describing complex technologies and/or processes in German (usually with the intent of generating interest in that company’s products or services in German speaking countries). I have quite often found that these companies decided not to invest in professional translators for these types of projects, but instead went with cheaper alternatives, to include machine-generated translations without any post-editing. The results are always predictable and range from unreliable terminology to incomprehensible gibberish.

Some time ago, I was working on a translation of a “float zone system” used in growing crystals for the semiconductor industry. During my initial web research, I came across the site of a small manufacturer of crystal growing equipment trying to promote his products to potential German buyers. The site was translated by a person other than a professional translator, as evidenced by the fact that ALL technical terms were left in English and put between quotation marks, rendering the translation basically useless (even when accounting for the fact that there is a fair number of technical terms in this industry that should indeed be left in English). It is hard to imagine that this particular buyer found even a single German buyer through their web site.

And about 4 years ago, I was translating information for German visitors to the Washington DC area, specifically information on how to use the local subway system. Imagine my surprise when I found an existing site, published by the same transit company, that was obviously created by translation software—with all the street names of subway/bus stops “translated” and directions for buying fare cards and using the systems that would have ensured that not one German tourist would be able to buy a ticket and get to where they really wanted to go. Obviously, a major blow to an image-conscious city like Washington, DC!

If possible, provide one example of a particular phrase or concept that only a properly qualified, professional translator would be able to correctly communicate.

I do a fair amount of translation work in the fields of printing and publishing, especially with the translation of manuals describing offset presses, register guidance systems, color control systems etc. The language used to describe this type of equipment is quite idiosyncratic and specific to this industry; terms that have a rather general meaning in common language take on a very specific meaning in connection with printing.

So, having worked in this field for over 12 years (and investing thousands of dollars in dictionaries and applicable reference books), I know that an “alley” is the space between columns of texts, except for a certain manufacturer, who uses “alley” as a synonym of “page.” I also know that a “circumferential position” is nothing more complex than a position in the up or down direction of a web (as opposed to a “lateral” position), and that “trapping” is the printing of one ink (color) over another. While the notion that common terms have a special significance when used in a particular technical field, applies to a host of specialties (IT is another prominent example), this is particularly true of the printing industry, and perplexing to anyone not familiar with it.

When I first started out as a professional translator and ventured out into this field, I was quickly humbled by falling into quite a few of these linguistic “traps” (pun intended!), and I didn’t waste any time in deciding that I had to invest a lot of time and effort in educating myself in this subject matter. As a professional, I simply had no other choice.

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