Multilingual Content Management for Life Sciences

July 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In Every Language has joined Wellpoint, one of the largest health benefits companies in the nation, Fetter Group, a content management company, and the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA) to offer a webinar that examines the management of life sciences content from all sides: content creation, change management, and localization. Conducted July 19th, a recording is available online to GALA members here.  If you are not a GALA member, please contact In Every Language for a copy.

The way life science and healthcare companies create and manage content is changing. It used to be all about massive document management, then eHealth, now it’s mHealth (or mobile health), too. Technology demands that information be created and disseminated in a diverse and connected world. So how do you manage it?

The webinar explores how issues specific to the life sciences and healthcare industries–like transparency, health exchanges, and consumer engagement–affect multilingual content management.  Speakers Terena Bell, Casandra Osterbrock, and Dayna Neumann also discuss how clients, content management systems (CMS), and translators must come together to form a system of checks and balances that keep content under control.

 

 

Filed Under: best practices, brands, business, business advice, clients, corporate translation, corporations, customer service, gala, global health, healthcare, In Every Language, international business, L10n, language service provider, language services, law, legislation, LEP patients, localisation, localization, machine translation, marketing, Medicare, message, social responsibility, standards of practice, Terena Bell, transcreation, translation, transparency, Twitter

The Games We Play: Competition in the Translation Industry

October 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Ali G’s ovaries were rotting and she wanted the world to know. On episode 1 of ABC’s 8th season of “The Bachelor,” she walked right up to Travis, told him “[her] eggs [were] rotting” and that she was ready for “the reproduction phase of [her] life.”  Needless to say, she didn’t get a rose.

For those of you who don’t watch the show — or who won’t admit to watching it — “The Bachelor” pits high-strung single females against one another for national media attention — ahem, I mean a man. It’s misogyny at its finest. ABC’s producers load them up with alcohol, shove them into romantic settings, and expect a love match to be made in 10 episodes or less. Each week, some of them “get a rose,” meaning they can stay, while some must “leave the mansion,” meaning they go home.

I love it. I will proudly admit in print that “The Bachelor” is one of my favorite shows. I don’t watch it because I’m a romantic, though, or because I truly want to see these poor, blinded people fall in love. I watch it because it’s the most entertaining sociological experiment out there. It’s a study in human behavior — how people react to each other, what draws them closer, what pushes them away. These are the games we play and once or twice a year, ABC plays them out on Monday nights for all of America to see.

Usually it’s more entertaining than not. Take poor Ali G for example. After getting booted off — as if rejection on national television wasn’t mortifying enough — she accosted the bachelor.  “Am I too short,” she asked, “Are my breasts too small? Why didn’t you choose me?”

Personally, I think “Because you discussed your ovaries on national television” would be the obvious answer. The less-than-obvious answer is that Ali G’s sales pitch was too strong. I say less-than-obvious because it’s a mistake we all make. An expression for “showing your cards too soon” only exists because more than one person has done it. Granted, I would personally argue that it’s always too early for a girl to pull the rotting eggs card with a man she’s seeing, but how often have language service providers (LSP’s) killed their chances of a sale because they reveled too much too soon?  Let’s admit it. Just as in dating, sometimes you don’t know when it’s safe to take that next move.

Now let’s move from “The Bachelor” to something a bit more industry-specific: conferences that attract both localization buyers and sellers. As our industry’s bachelor mansion, these hybrid events are interesting to begin with. You have a few bachelors — er, translation buyers — who do the choosing and a whole lot of ladies — translation sellers — hoping to get a rose. Don’t get me wrong: I love the idea of everyone involved in localization coming together to truly advance the industry. If real changes are going to occur with what we do, if innovation is truly to take place, it will require us all — buyer and seller — working together. That is the goal of these events, and it’s wonderful when people honestly and truly get that. The sad part is, not everyone gets it. Just like love, our industry has a few Ali G’s. What’s even sadder is that we have a few of the other contestants as well.

Again, if you’ve seen the show, you know what I’m talking about. These “other contestants” are the women who at some point stop caring about the bachelor and start caring more about the element of competition itself. Competition is like blood and they’re vampires, constantly at each other’s throats with grumblings and arguments. At first these fights are kept to the competitors only; they start in and stay in the mansion. But halfway through every season, they inevitably move out of the mansion and into the dates. Tune in around episode 4 or so and you’ll see it: the first insecure contestant to gripe to the bachelor that the other contestants aren’t being nice to her, that the contestant she fears he likes more than her is not who she seems. This happens in reverse, as well, on “The Bachelorette,” where season 6 contestant Jonathan — AKA “The Weatherman” — once spent an entire date trashing his competition to Bachelorette Ali F.

This too is a game we play. When I was a child, my mother told me there were two ways to have the tallest tower in town: you could knock down towers that belonged to other people or you could build yours higher. She told me to be the kind of girl who built hers higher.

Tower-knockers are the most common type of “Bachelor” contestant and they’re also the type most common in the language industry. Now, again, don’t get me wrong. I think by-and-large, we’re a friendly industry, one where companies tend to collaborate more than they compete. But there are some real competitors out there, people.

This is not reality television. We are real people running real companies. Our clients have real problems and — if we present them right — LSP’s have real solutions. Working with a full-service provider can help our clients improve content management, streamline billing, and grow their international and domestic revenues. But, as Ali G’s erstwhile efforts have proven, we cannot shove ourselves upon them. When a client is new to translation, there’s a lot he needs to learn in order to get the most for his money. But there’s also a balance between how much a person should know and how much a person can take. And when the project’s ready to be assigned, the client may most likely give only one LSP a rose.

We all want that rose. Let’s admit it. Whether our hearts are competitive or not, we each want to be the LSP that doesn’t have to leave the mansion, the one that gets the job. But maybe it’s time to admit it and move on, thinking beyond ourselves. On season 14, contestant Ali F — no clue why “The Bachelor” has so many Ali’s — dropped out voluntarily, because her work and other factors indicated she and the bachelor weren’t a good match. She wound up winning in the end, though, as ABC asked her to come back later to host her own season, where she met a man who was a better match — not “The Weatherman.” Sometimes losing a project means both you and the client win.

That’s because the games we play as people aren’t limited to romance. Our approach to romance, or to any kind of relationship, really, is just a microcosm of who we are. Do we respect other people? Are we too vulnerable to put ourselves out there, holding back our business’ finer qualities because we don’t want to be braggarts?  Or do we come on too strong, pushing each and every accomplishment on mailing list recipients like it’s hot, hot news?  The language services industry is replete with different sales and relational styles. Underneath all those company names and job titles, we’re still people. The question is, though, is your company self-actualized enough to stop playing games?  Are you the contestant who cares more about winning or the one who cares more about love?  When it comes to your business, is your highest concern the client’s best interest, or are you simply trying to win a game?

(This blog entry was originally published as an article in the September issue of MultiLingual Magazine.)

Filed Under: articles, best practices, competitions, conferences, customer service, ethics, language service provider, lsp, magazines, manners, marketing, multilingual, professionalism, translation industry, Uncategorized

Translating Slogans

January 31, 2011 By 3 Comments
In a per-word world, slogan translation should be some of the most inexpensive work we do. After all, something like Refreshingly Real is only two words. But what’s refreshingly real about slogan translation is that this type of work comes anything but cheap, in all the senses of the word. Translating slogans is difficult, pain-staking and downright costly — especially if you don’t get it right.
Since opening in 2005, In Every Language has translated slogans and catch phrases for everything from hamburgers to recliners to stud farms — that’d be horses, not good looking men. I’ve found that the act of translating slogans requires a collaborative environment between the translation company, the ad agency and the end client. And as with anything else we do, some clients are more collaborative than others. When both the ad agency and the end client are on board, the translation itself is more effective, the work is done more quickly and the bill itself can be lower. To translate anything, you have to understand it, but if you translate slogans long enough, it’s inevitable that someone — ad agency or end client side — will misunderstand and it unfortunately doesn’t take long for the email to arrive asking  why they have to “spend so much” or “wait so long” for something that’s “just a few words.”
When things go right, though, the client understands. Fortunately for us, there are agencies out there that know how much work they put into crafting those “few words” and realize  that translation will take more than an hour and $25. Others, though — especially smaller ones working with their first national or global account — somehow don’t grasp that what took them hours of work will also take hours — or maybe even days — of work from you.
That’s because our work parameters may be different, but the work itself can be very much the same. The ad folks are idea makers, given weeks or months with a product, hours or weeks with its maker, truly able to start from scratch in their conceptual dreaming. When it comes to writing or translating a slogan, in any language, you really are cramming everything about a product or a company — its soul, its spirit, its I Ch’ing — into “just a few words.”  You have to make the buyer acknowledge the product, you have to make him want the product and you have to make him remember to buy the product, all in the blink of an eye. That type of thoughtful capturing takes time, both in target and source.
But the ad agency has the home court advantage, so to speak, because it gets to start from scratch. Translators are guests in the deal, having to play on the ad agency’s basketball court, as they take what ad writers have decided is persuasive, then make it equally persuasive in another language for another group of people living in another culture — all while being true to the original text.
That’s why I still say slogan translation instead of transcreation, a term swiftly taking hold in our industry. If, as some argue, localization is simply translation done right, then transcreation is localization in the emperor’s new clothing. Despite the creative energies required, translators are not the creators here. If you go to dictionary.com, transcreation as a word isn’t even in there yet, but creation is. It’s “the act of producing or causing to exist; an original product of the mind.”  Translators are producing and their slogans definitely would not exist in the target language if it weren’t for them, but translated slogans are anything but “an original product of the mind.”  They’re much more intrinsically and difficulty birthed than that. In translating a slogan, you have to make people want, remember and buy the product, but you also have to do it within the confines of the original slogan’s want-remember-buy trifecta. Where the agency was free to explore, design and dream without any non-product parameters, translators must do those things within the parameters they have set. We are reshaping the idea, but we did not create the materials it is made of. But on what level?  And in what way?

Take the slogan “This should go over big.”  When McDonald’s ad agency came to us, they needed it translated specifically for Spanish speakers living in the United States. Now, before you get all excited, I have to tell you In Every Language is not the me encanta (I’m lovin’ it) company. While I’d love seeing my name — ahem, I mean my translation — up in lights, the slogan work we do for McDonald’s is much more local(ized) than anything marketed on an international level. The portion of Mickey D’s “billions and billions served” that sees our work is Hispanic Americans in the Midwest and Mid-South — principally Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. The translated slogans run in Spanish-language newspapers and are on roadside billboards in immigrant neighborhoods. Because of where the slogans appear, they can’t really be localized for a specific dialect. Here in Louisville, Kentucky alone, we have Spanish speakers born in Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Spain, Guatemala, Belize, Uruguay, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru and Puerto Rico. Take in the rest of the state, then the rest of the region and the list grows longer. And McDonald’s understandably doesn’t want to have to put up multiple billboards for all those different countries. The work we do must be localized for a Spanish-speaking consumer, but it must be generalized for all ethnicities of consumer all at once.

In most of these countries, a Big Mac is called a Big Mac. It’s not a Grande Mac, a Mac Gigante or anything where we could readily use the name of the sandwich to linguistically play on its size. The word big itself wasn’t capitalized, either, which means that the link between the sandwich being a Big Mac and its being big in size wasn’t meant to be overly overt, anyway. So on to the next point of consideration: what the slogan was trying to say, as opposed to exactly what it said. And I think it’s quite obvious to anyone reading this article that the core message of this slogan was that a Big Mac is big. Not only is it big, but it was going to be a smash hit.
In Louisville, we’re odd for the United States in that there are more Cubans than Spanish-speakers of any type. So our first impulse was ¡Cosa más grande! (The biggest thing!), a typical Cuban expression used to denote surprise or praise. Perfect, you might think, as it gets across the sheer overwhelming nature of the Big Mac’s large size and also manages to play on the word big. But not so quick. Remember we’re working with different dialects and outside of Cuba, this phrase is actually quite funny because of the triteness of it all. Remember Bart Simpson?  Well, “Cowabunga, dude” might have been alright — I would never argue cool — to say when Bart first hit the scene in 1989, but say it now and you’ll get laughed right out of pretty much anywhere except an English-as-a-foreign-language class. So, think of ¡Cosa más grande! as something like that — a phrase that does, in fact, mean something and that some speakers might think was cool – but think of Cuba as English class — the one place where ¡Cosa más grande! is actually okay for grown-ups to seriously say. Next, please.
Leave Louisville and go into the rest of our region and you’ll meet a lot of Mexicans. And face it, when clients say they want generalized Spanish for the US, what they most often ask for is Mexican. Mexican is the catch-all Spanish in our country, whether it  should be or not. So, effort number two was No te hagas de la boca chiquita (Don’t pretend you have a small mouth) — a Mexican expression, but at least one people from other countries wouldn’t make fun of. First problem, though: it was still a little dialect-specific. Second problem: While the expression is said when a host wants a dinner guest to feel comfortable and eat up, its size word (chiquita) references small, not big. We wanted to stay away from any subliminal ties small vs. big might convey.
So onto solution three: Esto va en grande (This is going to be big). Pay dirt. Esto va en grande is understood in multiple countries, uses the word grande and is said when the speaker wants to reassure the listener that what is heading his way really is the real deal, positive and not just a promise.
So, our translation for This should go over big went over pretty well with the client and we got set to translate our next slogan for them: Refreshingly Real. When we received the copy, there was no context at all, just the slogan and this sentence: “Is it possible to have a few words translated into Spanish by Monday?,” followed by a request that we also translate the word small. So, we didn’t know what McDonald’s item was being modified, just that it was refreshing, real and might come in different sizes. I think we’d all agree that’s not enough to go on. This is where that collaborative environment comes in. With This is going to be big, there was some back and forth trying to get it right, but given a picture of a Big Mac and the original slogan, it didn’t take a genius to figure out the factors involved. Refreshingly Real, though, was a bit more problematic.
We asked for an image, like we’d had of the Big Mac and point blank asked, “What is refreshingly real? (McDonald’s? A specific sandwich? A drink?)”  Enter fruit smoothies ad, the magical PDF that held the key to solving all our dangling modifier problems.  Or so we thought.
Smoothies, by and large, are an American concept. Going through a drive-thru and ordering a cold drink that comes in a cup the size of Montana is not really something folks do outside of the United States. We found ourselves not only translating a slogan, but introducing its concept, since we had to complete the rest of the ad, which promoted real fruit smoothies. 
Now, while I’ll argue that slogans are still translated, naming products definitely falls under transcreation. Research showed that frappé is the most common Spanish word for smoothie, where smoothies do exist, but the problem was McDonald’s already sold frappés and those frappés were already called frappés by Spanish-speakers in the Midwest and Mid-South. In this forever determining of the linguistic path of the fruit smoothie, we were truly starting from scratch.
So what did we name it? In most of South America, people say smoothie for fruit drinks and frappé for coffee drinks. In Mexico, frappé works for both coffee and fruit drinks. Malteada and batido both specifically mean milkshake, but McDonald’s new fruit smoothies don’t have any ice cream in them. Our team thought of raspado, which is similar to slushie, but raspado was too regional; non-Mexicans would be confused by McDonald’s selling fruit scraps. In the end, we went with frappé after all and stuck de fruitas (fruit) after it to modify. Boring, I know, but why reinvent the rueda (wheel)?
After getting smoothie figured out, refreshingly real (verdaderamente refrescantes) was refreshingly easy.
It just goes to show, though, that what may be “just a few words” to the client is an entire thought process for us. Our world is anything but a per-word one, where two little words can quickly turn into an intensive spelunking mission deep into the heart of Spanish smoothie history. Translation can turn into transcreation and next thing you know, the project scope has changed.  But what hasn’t changed and what’s sitting there making your job harder is that translators must still consider the original marketer’s intent, the original ad’s language, the product itself and the target market(s). Creativity can be controlled, but collaboration can‘t be, as some clients are naturally more forthcoming and cooperative than others. I suppose we should take it as a compliment when these clients get upset about having to “spend so much” or “wait so long.”  It just means that we as translators are good at what we do, that we’re offering the type of customer service where cultural and linguistic exploration is a given, because the best slogan translators are skilled at making something look easy that clearly is not.

(This article initially ran in MultiLingual Magazine.)

Filed Under: advertising, client education, customer service, marketing, multilingual, slogans, Spanish, transcreation, translation

Video Killed the Radio Star

December 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment
If video killed the radio star, there’s no telling what it will do to translation.
Of course, I’m referring to the Buggles’ smash hit and the first video to play on MTV. Since August 1, 1981, this British punk song has been covered by Radiohead, the Violent Femmes, Presidents of the United States—even Alvin and the Chipmunks has gotten with the groove. And when the Chipmunks get with it, no matter what “it” is, you know it’s gone mainstream.
Face it, folks: video is taking over. According to YouTube, site-goers watch two billion videos a day and upload “hundreds of thousands of videos daily. In fact, every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.”  And while I’m sure translation is not the most frequently searched term, that doesn’t mean we in the translation industry should ignore the medium.
And we don’t. We localize for it. After all, someone has to write subtitles and translate all those on-location scripts. Do a search on IMDb, the end-all, be-all for video and film production credits, and you’ll find language service providers (LSP’s) listed under “Production Services,” “Post-Production Services,” “Special Thanks,” “Visual Effects,” “Miscellaneous,” and “Costume & Wardrobe” (your guess is as good as mine here). The unfortunate thing, though, is that most LSP’s that subtitle as a specialization aren’t listed on the site. Instead, listings include LSP’s that “minor” in film, so to speak, and a large number of businesses based in India. Apparently, the way the mainstream moviegoers access film credits is not how most movie-localizing companies get out their name.
This divide between how our industry publicizes itself and how the common man accesses information extends far beyond IMDb. Whether we’re ready to admit it or not, as an industry, we’ve constructed a tower for ourselves with a gigantic moat around it. I don’t think we meant to; this construction progressively arose from both LSP’s and freelancers logically going where the money is.
Experienced, sophisticated buyers are a simply an easier sell for most people. Instead of having to sell them on the principle of translation, you need only sell them on yourself. The level of client education they require tends to be processes- or project-based; the projects themselves tend to be more profitable than your average birth certificate. That’s not to say sophisticated buyers don’t come with their own set of issues — just that it’s a commonly accepted assumption that a Fortune 500 is a better client over time than your neighborhood podiatrist.
Unfortunately this thinking leaves the podiatrist and his “tell me again why the secretary can’t do it” buddies behind. As a corporate sales strategy, it’s necessary to stay in business. We focus our energy and our strengths on targeting the more profitable clients; this keeps our doors open and our coffers full. But as far as strategic development for the language industry goes, a lot of under-educated buyers and influencers remain that way. As a result, we create an “in-club” — a select group of sophisticated buyers, many of whom are establishing internal localization departments or single points of company contact.
Any time you have an in-club, you have an out-club: people who aren’t invited to the party, but who want to go nonetheless. These are the small businesses with 1-2 projects a year, the manufacturers who are only now beginning to export, small-town doctors across the country treating their first immigrant patients. By inadvertently making our party “invitation-only” for the seasoned-buyer elite, we have made professional language services unapproachable for the rest of the world. And what happens when you’re not invited to the in-club’s party?  You throw your own and tell yourself it’s better. This is why this second group of clients relies on bilingual secretaries, substitute Spanish teachers, and their 17 year-old’s two-years of high-school French. They’ve never been invited to the professionals’ party, and they hold close to their own ways of doing because they don’t want to admit that something better has excluded them before. This natural course of events has led this group to see professional translators as a unreachable pedantics, if they even see us at all. The tower we then find ourselves in may have been constructed unintentionally, but it still leaves us trapped.
I won’t spend too much time on this. After all, this article is on how the language industry should and can market itself through video. But I do want to point out that before we can use video to solve our industry’s problems, we must first understand and acknowledge those problems and where they come from. In the end, it all boils down to one thing: the vast majority of people don’t understand what we do.

 

According to a Sunday Times report, only 27% of Americans got their news from written sources, like newspapers or magazines.Since the survey was conducted in 2008, The Times’ source, the Pew Research Centre, shows a biannual trending down for all news sources except cable television and the internet, which are both going up. In 2009, the American newspaper industry suffered 15,114 layoffs (News-Cycle). Video has not only killed the radio star, but it’s killed your daily newspaper as well.

 

If newspapers are dead, it’s logical that white papers and text-heavy presentations will follow. I personally pray daily for a world where PowerPoints have gone to die. Instead, I see sales staff whipping out mobile phones that are wired to show a client a pre-produced video illustrating the insert-your-company-name-here advantage right on the spot. Want to learn more about our interpreters’ quality?  Watch one in action right here. Want to know how pleased our customers really are?  Take a look at this video we taped during post-project review last week.

The technology is there. We just have to use it. Fuze Meeting, an app for Blackberry and iPhone, allows for video conferencing and the screen sharing of presentations and other data, including pre-produced videos. If you had your video presentation online and ready to go, you could easily show it on your phone during a client meeting.

 

In fact, in a June 2010 interview with Entrepreneur, Nextel CEO Dan Hesse infers that video will soon be the preferred medium for business presentations. “Video applications are going to be more common, particularly as you get into a 4G network environment. There will be a lot more video, TV and movie downloads. You’ll see this in both entertainment and business applications.”

 

A land of video sales presentations would be a heck more impressive than those hideous, bullet-point lists clients are often trapped into looking at, as the points are read aloud by sales staff who are just as bored as they are. Of course, I have a personal distaste for PowerPoints, being a Gen X-er with a textbook case of can’t-sit-still. PowerPoint or no, I just don’t do boring. I know I soon won’t be the only one, though, as an even younger, can’t-sit-still generation graduates from college and becomes employed, translation’s traditional decision makers eventually retiring, then being replaced by what Meg Ryan’s character on You’ve Got Mail calls “a whole generation of young people without last names.”

 

If problem number one is that people don’t understand what we do, then problem number two is that we must change the way we reach them. I’m no soothsayer, so I can’t tell you the exact date, but soon — and very soon — the old ways of reaching people will stop working. In fact, the way we communicate has already changed so much that, as a species, we’ve changed how we process information we’re given. To quote Psychology Today columnist Pamela Rutledge, “A picture is worth a thousand words but a video says it all… Humans process information from images far more efficiently than words alone. Video is an image on speed — it engages different sensory inputs and delivers an image stream.”  Rutledge goes on to discuss how “[s]ocial media [such as YouTube] allows for the distribution of videos to be immediate, targeted, personal, and accessible on-demand.”

 

Attention spans are shorter, a whole group of under-educated clients misunderstands what we do, and the translation industry’s most traditional way of reaching people—the written word—is dying a slow, online death. Not only are we now in a tower of our own creation, but Rapunzel’s running out of hair to lower for our escape.

 

We have reached the moment, in many ways, as an industry, to decide what our future will hold. The Buggles song warns of us being “rewritten by machine and new technology.” Sound familiar, anyone?

 

Just as there are two problems, there are two answers: either our industry associations fix it or we do.

 

There’s why reason that our tower was constructed: it’s simply not economically-sustainable for the individual LSP to carry the burden of client education. This is where our associations come into play. As an industry we are working hard — harder than ever before — to develop recognition as a profession. New trade associations and industry events, particularly in the realm of interpreting, pop up every day. But the amount of turning outward — the number of these efforts geared toward client education instead of self-edification—is remarkably low. We are continuing to invite only ourselves to the party.

 

I do not mean to undervalue efforts that have been made; I am appreciative of the efforts our trade associations are currently making. In medical interpreting, the National Council of Interpreting in Health Care (NCIHC) and others involved with the Certification Commission for Healthcare Interpreters  (CCHI) are truly doing their best to make proverbial waves the moat. We’ve all seen copies of the American Translators Association’s (ATA) “Translation: Getting It Right” brochure and an “Interpreting: Getting It Right,” as well as client outreach newsletters, are on their way. The Globalization and Localization Association (GALA) promotes its conferences as being for both localization seller and buyer.

 

But the trades are in the unique position of being able to do what the LSP cannot: the trades can educate the under-educated. Whereas an LSP must economically and structurally guard itself, the trades guard our profession. It is their job and duty to invite everyone to the party. While LSP’s are the in position of being able to change their clients’ perception, the associations can change public perception.

 

A change in public perception is what’s required to tear down the tower and drain the moat. First-time and intermittent buyers may not believe an LSP that says the secretary shouldn’t translate. The LSP is, after all, trying to sell them something they don’t even realize they need. But they are much more likely to believe the trades. If you think beef is what’s for dinner, it’s not because the grocery said so, but because the National Cattleman’s Beef Association did. Our industry associations are the third-party gateway to bridging the divide.

 

Some associations have already stepped up. The Health Care Interpreter Network, the International Medical Interpreters Association, ATA, and GALA all have a current presence on YouTube, Vimeo, or both.

 

The first two use their channels primarily for education. Health Care Interpreter Network has informative videos on the essential role of interpreters in healthcare. IMIA’s videos focus on the organization’s recent certification efforts with Language Line Services, encouraging interpreters and healthcare professionals to join together. The most educational videos on the market, though, are out of Monterey, where the Institute for International Studies has posted videos like “A Day in the Life of an Interpreter” and “5 Questions for a French Translator.” ATA’s videos are much more intrinsic, using its YouTube channel to advertise annual conferences, and GALA’s channel is a mix, including both conference promotion and presentations.

 

The Association of Language Companies (ALC) is also joining the game. While no videos were yet online when this article was written, the ALC appointed a video task force in January and the task force recorded video for future use at the association’s conference in May.

 

Together, these organizations have done the early work necessary to implement video as the powerful client education tool it can be; now they just need to finish.

 

It is important, though, for us to realize that the associations cannot do it all. In case you haven’t noticed, most of our associations are volunteer-led. Even those with paid staff — like NCIHC, ATA, and ALC — still rely on volunteer labor for PR initiatives. If it’s not sustainable for a single LSP to fully take on this burden, then the average industry volunteer, though well-intending, isn’t able to do it for her association either.

 

This is what I mean when I say we are the second solution. The associations represent us and are made up of us. We are their main source of ideas and strength. To bastardize John F Kennedy, ask not what your association can do for you. No one knows your target market better than you do. If you’re the only LSP in Huntsville, Alabama, it’s easy to say you’re isolated, fighting your own battles, and that the association should do more to help you. But they don’t know Huntsville. They’re not in Huntsville. And if you don’t help them, their efforts won’t work. You know your market’s needs and if you don’t, there’s not an educational video out there that will keep you in business.

 

Regardless of who acts, the time to act is now. A whole group of new clients is out there, and if they don’t understand why they should get translation from professionals, then they will get it from amateurs. Clearly, video isn’t the only thing that could kill translation. But video may be the best thing to save it. Educational video changes public perception. Changing perception knocks down the tower. Knocking down the tower brings everyone together. Unless, of course, you want to stay trapped.

 

(This article initially ran in MultiLingual Magazine.)

 

References:

IMDb: the Internet Movie Database. www.imdb.com

O’Shea, Dan. “The New Power of Mobility.” Entrepreneur. June 2010. p 51.

Richards, Jonathan. “More people get news from web than TV or print.” Sunday Times: London,

        England, August 18, 2008. http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/

        article4559162.ece

Rutledge, Pamela. “Honey, We Shrunk the Time or 5 Things to Remember about Social Media.”

        Psychology Today Blog. December 1, 2009. www.psychologytoday.com/blog/positively-

        media/200912/honey-we-shrunk-the-time-or-5-things-remember-about-social-media.

Unattributed. News-Cycle. http://news-cycle.blogspot.com/p/newspaper-industry-layoff-totals.html

YouTube. www.youtube.com.

Filed Under: alc, associations, ata, client education, gala, imia, language service provider, marketing, NCIHC, public relations, sales, translation, video, video blog, vimeo, youtube

Top Tweeters at Sustainable Brands

June 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I’ll blog more on the event and its impact on the translation industry later, but just to bring my followers up to speed as I prepare to board my flight home: this week I have been in Monterey, CA for the Sustainable Brands conference–the place where Fortune 500 and other leading companies come together to discuss our nation’s need for environmentally and socially responsible business, as well as how to market CSR.

I just found out that In Every Language has been named one of the top 85 Tweeters from the event. To add perspective, 700 people attended from countries all around the world.

You can learn more about the conference and check out who else made the list at http://greeneconomypost.com/whos-tweeting-sustainable-brands-10-check-out-our-list-10434.htm .

And thanks Green Economy Post! We appreciate the recognition!

Filed Under: big business, brands, corporate translation, CSR, environment, environmental responsibility, green, marketing, social entrepreneur, social media, social responsibility, sustainability, Twitter

ATA, TCD, & Conferences in General

August 27, 2009 By 3 Comments

Today my translation project manager and I spent a lot of time pouring over the schedule of seminars for the upcoming American Translators Association (ATA) conference in New York City. After attending the conference last year, I wasn’t really overwhelmed with a great need to go again this year, but after attending the Translation Company Division (TCD) conference in Quebec this summer, I’m reconsidering. One of the reasons I had elected not to go to this year’s ATA was that the sessions just aren’t built for language service provider (LSP) owners. And that’s okay. The ATA’s purpose isn’t really to help us, no matter how hard the TCD may try. The ATA is for the freelancer. I agree with Ted Wozniack, German translator and active ATA member, when he says that the ATA should drop corporate memberships all together–that the Association of Language Companies (ALC) should represent LSPs while the ATA represents freelancers, and that the ALC and the ATA should represent the profession as a whole. But I meander.

Simply put, while the ATA conference might be fun, it’s not at all educational for LSP execs. This year’s schedule, for example, is packed full of such money-making thrillers as “U.S. and European Union Translation Quality International Standards” and “The Translation Service Market in China as Seen from Local Language Services Providers.” Utterly enthralling and very applicable to running a more profitable business, I know. (Please note the sarcasm in my tone.)

So then why am I even thinking about going? Because I’ve finally learned what a conference is all about. Call me a silly girl, but when I went to my first translating & interpreting conference in 2006, I went to learn. Did I learn there, and have I learned at others since? Yes. Lesson one? You don’t go to conferences to learn. You go to network.

Networking is a historically ugly word, conjuring up images of chiropractors and realtors huddling around the cheese table at your local chamber of commerce event, pushing off glossy business cards with their photos printed on them, pronouncing your name wrong as they say, “Call me,” and shove the rectangular piece of paper stock in your hand. But networking at a conference–when done right–is entirely different than at chamber mixers, 100% of which I now make a forcible effort to avoid. At a conference, you can spend one-on-one time with people who actually do what you do (rare in our profession) and openly discuss ideas to help you both grow and learn. If you do it right, as I finally learned how to do at this year’s TCD, then a freeflow of ideas is created, leading to the innovation that will see translating & interpreting through the crowdsourcing panic and beyond the fear and doubt caused by the continuing improvement of machine translation. These conferences then become the place where you can individually assure yourself and collectively improve. If there are truly any new thought leaders being born in our profession, then conferences are the places where they are grown.

So, all that said, will I be at ATA? I think we both know, if I am, it sure won’t be for the sessions.

Filed Under: alc, ata, business, conferences, language service provider, lsp, machine translation, marketing, networking, tcd

Translation: The Key to Excellent Customer Service

February 21, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Foreign language translation could be your key to better customer service and to higher sales.

There’s a German saying that I love to quote: If I’m selling, I’ll speak English, but if I’m buying, Sie mussen deutsch sprecken (you have to speak German). I like that sentence because it points out the one thing that American companies seem to get right domestically, but not internationally: customer service comes first.

Here in the land of “the customer is always right,” we tend to think that the customer always speaks English. And, a lot of the time, we’re right. In Denmark, for example, English is taught from elementary school up. English is the most popular foreign language taught to grade schoolers in the EU and has quickly become a powerful language of commerce throughout all of Asia. But just because someone speaks a language doesn’t mean that they speak it well or that you should expect them to. Your customers may speak English, but when it comes to strengthening your sales, is English the language of customer service?

Papa Johns International, CNN, Wells Fargo, the American Lung Association, Lowe’s, even the IRS–across multiple industries, through online and print advertising, American business are starting to tap into the 52 million people in this country who speak a language other than English at home. These people just aren’t immigrants; they’re a target market. That’s why companies like Bank of America, DISH Network, and AT&T are offering their websites in Spanish–because they want to reach out to this market. Because if they don’t reach out to them, someone else will and their money–that sale–will go to the competition. Trick of the matter is, however, if you want to reach them, you can’t do it in English. According to the US Census Bureau, in 2005, over 29 percent of all Spanish speakers, 22 percent of Asian and Pacific Islander speakers, and more than 13 percent of Indo-European speakers in the US today speak English “not well” or “not at all.” This is in a country where English is the spoken vernacular, the language of education and commerce, the main language used for publishing and broadcasting news, as well as the language used in the medical field. This is the United States of America, where there is a higher concentration of English speakers than anywhere else in the world. Yet even here, you can not assume that your customer speaks English.

This is only if you do business domestically. If you want to do business on an international scale, you must also think and act internationally. You may not speak French, but if you are selling to the French, you need to at least learn how to say “Bonjour.” Like the German saying I quoted earlier, a German business man looking to buy will buy from the salesman who uses German.

American companies are known worldwide for their superb capabilities for customer service. And while many might argue that it is harder to get waited on in a store than it used to be, that is still the mantra of sales in America today. The customer comes first. The customer is always right. The customer is our top priority. This is why I find it shocking that many companies doing business in non-English speaking countries fail to see the practicality of foreign language use. It’s simply good customer service–communicating with them, marketing to them, and making deals with them in a language they can understand.

So, in a nation where many of our top execs and graduating talent pool do not speak a foreign language, where does this leave us? The world changes quickly. One minute, the popular business country is Japan. Then it’s India. Then it’s China, then it’s India again. And not everyone is good at learning languages. Some people, no matter how hard they try, just can’t get past lesson six. And it may not be cost or time effective to become fluent in the language of every company you have dealings with.

This is where translation comes in. This is why the translation industry exists–because someone has to be there to break the communication barrier. My company, In Every Language, for example, offers services in 155 different languages. There is no way any single employee could become fluent in 155 different languages. Translation companies therefore save businesses time and money by doing the linguistic legwork for them. It’s why we’re here. It’s our job. We speak those languages so you don’t have to. For a just a few cents per word, translators can get your material in front your buyers in a language they can understand.

Yes, translation costs money. But how much money could a good translation make you? If you made one dollar from every non-English speaking American, the US Census Bureau says you’d make 12 million bucks. 12 million. You may or may not see the benefits of reaching out to the non-English speaking market, but you can bet your competition does. And once they already have that market, there may not be much room in it left for you. We all know the power of brand loyalty. If your competition achieves brand loyalty before you do, you may one day have to spend money on translation just to stay alive. Wouldn’t you rather spend that money on making a profit?

Translation services are therefore not just a way to provide customer service, but they’re a way to increase your sales. Customer service does come first, but in this case, customer service goes out before you, paving your way to profits and sales success.

Filed Under: business, customer service, languages, marketing, sales, translation