Are you diluting your brand?

Are you intentionally diluting your brand with your multilingual communications?

Your multilingual communications are a valuable element of your brand assets, not a commodity. With translating and transcreating an organization's marketing publications, we consider brand equity.

How is the brand affected by translation? Does the organization’s brand risk dilution at any point in the process? Do you maintain a consistent brand while respecting cultural nuances? Is there a strategy for global brand consistency?

Transcreation is growing in our industry. It's a more creative translation.  However, we believe all translation is creative because it's not a literal process but more of a concept to concept process.  But transcreators do focus on capturing the emotion of the original.  It's important for your transcreators to know as much about your target market and what emotion you want to evoke - the same strategy you shared with your English writing team.

A more literal translation of your marketing materials can dilute your brand.  Be sure to get feedback from your language provider on what works and what doesn't work in translation, what is considered copywriting, what elements need to be localized.

We specialize in marketing communications.  Give us a call about taking your brand into other countries or languages.

Project Management

We believe that excellence in project management should be something you expect from a Language Service Provider. However, Project management is often overlooked when it comes to choosing an LSP.

Project analysis, process management, cost management, planning and organization and communication are just a few of the many skills that you should expect from a project manager. So when you pay for the skill of a translator to do an excellent translation job, doesn’t it make sense that you should pay for project management as well? How else would you know for sure that you receive the care that your project deserves?

Ask yourself:

• Do I get insightful questions or suggestions before the start of a project that helped mitigate risk?
• Are details remembered throughout a project, even if I need to speak to another project manager?
• Does my LSP seem knowledgeable about my company and my product or service?
• Are my projects always on time and on budget?
• Can I ask my project manager a question about a project that was completed a long time ago?
• Do I feel that my files and intellectual property are handled securely and with care?
• Can I count on a timely response on questions, even if they fall outside of the normal business hours?

At Language Solutions, our PMs are Localization Certified.  100% of our PMs are also certified Malcomb Baldrige Examiners and Internal auditors for ISO 9001:2008.  We take project management seriously so you can have peace of mind.

Case Study: Purchase decisions that can come back with a bite!

We track all of our quote performances which enable us to see how well we do in converting bid requests into 'wins'. This helps us to understand if we really understood what the client's requirements were, what their constraints were, what they expected and revealed and what they didn't reveal.

Recently, we received a quote request for some updates to work that we originally did a quote on in 2008; a loss at the time.

Now, four years and several copy updates further, we were doing the updates to translation work that (several) previous vendors had done in the last 4 years. It was not a cheap update. The client spent close to half of the original quote amount on doing new updates; updates that were missed by previous vendors. Many of the costs also came from having to rework existing translations so that it matched the English; mostly manual work. The original quote was for doing the whole translation from scratch and in the long run...would have been a much better investment!

It poses an interesting question: How much money did this client really save by not going with us in the first place? We don't know how much the client paid for the original translation, but we do know that the relatively simple updates to this book could have been far more cost effective if we had done the work up front.

We wrote a blog entry a few years back that potential pains that follow from purchase decisions usually become apparent after the fact. While we try to explain the benefit of our processes as much as possible, it is unfortunate that the real cost benefit becomes clear when it is too late. In this case study, we highlight the following benefits from our processes that could have avoided some of those pains:

• Asset Building - It's hard to put a price on this, but translation work become an asset if you manage it well (there is a cost to that) and make it accessible when doing future updates. Without any Translation Memory, maintaining consistency of terminology becomes a costly and messy manual process. It takes time to read through work that has been done before and identify and apply that to future updates. Add the manual work of updating glossaries and index work to it and it becomes clear that the time invested in manual research could easily outweigh the investment in maintaining a good Translation Memory. The problem with the manual processes is that there is always a bigger chance for error as opposed to a systematic process that we maintain. 

• Version Control - Version control is tied with Asset Building. Knowing what has been translated before and what has not removes the pain of manually comparing translations against the source language. Version control can become a real burden when updates are made to the source copy through different reviewers. No matter how good you keep track of changes, things can slip through and without proper management, you will never know what has been done before and what is now current. We keep a version of both the source and target language of every project so that we can always compare updates to the latest control copy that was used for translation. Changes are easily identified at the word level in our Translation Memory software.

• Qualified Teams of Professional Translators - Rework of past translations is a costly endeavor, whether you have maintained a Translation Memory asset or not. There is no one way to translate something, but when certain punctuation and capitalization rules have not been followed, identifying and correcting those issues becomes a manual process that will take time to do properly across the board. Qualified translators keep up with the latest linguistic requirements. We also maintain the same team of translators for a project as much as possible, which helps with maintaining consistency in style and preference in wording. We work hard to make sure these teams remain available and they come back to us to do the work because we are organized and invest in the relationships we have built over the years.

• Quality Control - Translation does not stand on its own. It usually gets worked into a final product such as a design file or a website. While we work hard to eliminate as many manual processes from that conversion in our process, there are always manual processes in refining the copy. Each document that goes out has been proofed by the linguist to ensure proper display. Without that process, errors can easily build up over years and identifying and correcting these issues becomes a costly manual process.

We wrote earlier that it is important to understand what you buy and compare apples to apples when deciding on various quotes. It's not always an easy decision and budgets sometimes do not support the investment that you want to make up front; but consider in your bidding process the future cost and impact that these decisions could have on your budget. This case study could help make that decision for this client and we're always here to explain this further to support the budget needs for your next project.

Language Solutions is ISO certified

Language Solutions has received ISO 9001:2008 Quality Management Certification from BSI International Registrars.

We started working on ISO Certification in late January and managed to get our Quality Manual documented and successfully completed both of our planned audits with BSI (Stage I and Stage II) by August.

Download our Certificate

We were particularly successful with ISO certification because we've listened to the requirements from the ISO standard and let our processes (that were driven by customer requirements, innovation and through industry best practices) lead us to achieving the requirements rather than the other way around. During the audit it became apparent to the auditor that we had created a system of processes that is effective and fits with the needs of our clients.

The culture of Quality Management and Quality Excellence was already ingrained in our organization. During our test phase we learned that 80% of the ISO requirements were already met when we started and we made further improvements to our process to ensure that we met all of the requirements. The mindset of quality management and continuous process improvement was shaped by our involvement in Baldrige Performance Excellence and provided us with better understanding how ISO could be beneficial to our organization. ISO gave us new tools to use in our quest for performance excellence and is playing an active role in the every day management of the organization.


Implementation of ISO can be a daunting task, but it can be very rewarding if approached with the intent to make the organization better. We believe that ISO is an important addition to the success of our organization. The ISO certification is just the start. We plan to continuously review our Quality Management System against the requirements of our customers using the ISO standard and Baldrige Best Practices in our management toolkit.

Why you need a CGO

A recent article in Fortune Magazine mentioned seven new C-level areas expected to emerge in the next 5 years. The magazine predicted some interesting positions such as the Chief Perception Officer. Surprisingly, a Chief Globalization Officer was not considered as one of these emerging areas.

Is global expansion and important growth factor in your business? If so, can you identify who in your organization is currently the champion for setting the global business directive? Our experience is that organizations that are just starting expanding globally usually do not assign a dedicated manager and resources for their global expansion. Global is not managed by one person or division but rather managed by many people at different levels of the organization, with different budgets and different managers. Management responsibilities grow organically over time as they become natural extensions of someone's current responsibilities.

This could be a risk when global expansion becomes more important to the business and needs to be managed. We've talk about this growth and maturation risk in an earlier blog post.

Without centralization, can your organization truly create global communication initiatives effectively and with consistency? If you are not able to pinpoint where global 'lives' in your organization, your organization will benefit from having a partner that your organization can count on for managing and coordinating global communications across the organization.

Examples of benefits: Value Added Resellers can grow their international accounts by actively being involved in the sales process. You can protect your brand message through centralization, ensuring that no unwanted brand messaging in your global communication piece goes out the door.

Consider Language Solutions as your 'Chief Globalization Officer' for centralization and management of your global communications. With defined metrics and goals that span the organization, we bring a global communication strategy to your organization tailored to your needs that would require an investment at a fraction of having to set up your own department with management responsibility.

Our focus on globalization strategies is as much directed towards the organizational goals as it is to work to support the people who 'make global happen'. If your organization has an international department or is starting to coordinate globalization efforts, we can deliver knowledge and experience that can help you move through the maturation curve effectively. Allow us to sit down with your department and talk about managing your global communication efforts and see the benefits of having a partner that goes beyond just translation.

What do you consider when choosing a Translation Vendor?

In previous posts, we've discussed the buying process of multilingual communications. In this video, we ask you to consider various important factors when choosing a translation vendor:

Metrics for Linguistic Screening of Product Names

There is a whole array of considerations that marketers and product developers go through before they even decide on a product name in their domestic market. However, these considerations are often overlooked during product name testing for their foreign markets.

When our clients come to us for linguistic screening of their English product names, our start is to take inventory of the main considerations that went into development of the brand for the domestic market. Here are a few examples of the most prevalent metrics for linguistic screening:

The Brand Concept

We consider the elements such as brand positioning, brand messaging, and product segmentation to be the foundation for analysis in the target market. We leverage the knowledge that was created during the name development to test and analyze in the target market.

The Language

Linguistic screening should not only take into account appropriate meaning in other languages but also the ease by which a product name can be pronounced by a person from another country. Pronunciation could be an important success factor in product name adoption. Product names are often ambiguous and created without direct meaning. Therefore, a valuable attribute could be a powerful sounding name. Names could be unintentionally softened through differences in pronunciation in the target market. Understanding how a product sounds in the target market can be valuable information in choosing a product name.

The Culture

Cultural analysis can include a wide variety of aspects. One example is the use of colors and images that are appropriate and engaging. Another aspect is name associations. In product name development, associations with competitors or other organizations is usually taken into account for different reasons (legal reasons, unique factor, etc.). Powerful associations can be made with similar words used in related or unrelated industries, or for instance in popular culture. Especially with highly ambiguous names, powerful associations that support the brand positioning can be a key success factor and should be tested in the target markets. Cultural views may vary by generation and therefore an important attribute is to understand the target segmentation of the product. Gender roles in purchasing are also important to consider as these differ by country. You may not be marketing to the decision maker!

Product Analysis

While actual product testing is not part of the scope for linguistic screening, we also should not discount the value of product analysis for the target market. Product aspects such as packaging and design can be taken into consideration and analyzed for further testing in the target market. Having product aspects analyzed before you test in your target market can help narrow down the goals for expensive tests using local focus groups.

The Linguistic Screening process should benefit from open communication and flow of information between product developers and linguistic and cultural analysts. Too many times, the brand development process is overlooked in product name development for a foreign market. When considering the investment that has gone into the product and the potential it could have, the investment in a carefully executed linguistic screening process should be a drop in the bucket.

The next time your client or your company wants to screen their English product name in other languages, give us a call for a proprietary process that we use.