Background
Ulatus translated 507,000 words of public social media posts for an online social networking giant. The entire project of translating the English content into 3 Indian languages was completed in a record time of 12 business days.
Social media translation is fun, but it has its own challenges. Translators have to exercise good judgment and creatively adapt slang, informal, or grammatically incorrect expressions into their closest equivalent terms or sentences. While translators might have to deal with words that don’t exist in their target language, they have to ensure to retain the spirit and tone of the original content. It requires multiple skill sets of translating as well as transliterating text to achieve a high-quality localized content.
Challenges
Our client Gengo a leading language service provider required a high quality partner for an Indian language translation project for their end client – an online social media and social networking giant.
- The turnaround time of this high volume project of translating into multiple languages was a short window of two weeks. Usually such projects have a standard turnaround time of approx. 10 weeks.
- This significant project came up during a major festive season in India when most linguists are on leave and unavailable even for a small request. The deadline was not negotiable and the project had to be completed during this period.
- The posts were very crude and had to be carefully translated across multiple languages (Hindi, Tamil, & Bengali) while keeping in mind that the translations are true to their original expressions.
- Gengo required intermittent deliveries of the translated text. The initial delivery was due within the first three days from the start date.
- For such a high volume and short timeline project, providing translations in multiple languages complicates matters for the project management team who have to manage different linguists as well as meet different language needs.
How we overcame the challenges?
- Despite most linguists being unavailable during the festive season, we successfully formed a team of 9 best linguists for Hindi, Tamil, & Bengali translations with confirmed availability for 2 weeks.
- To guarantee properly nuanced translations, these translators were shortlisted out of 50 qualifying linguists based on their relevant background, expertise, and results of test samples.
- We also designated a backup team of linguists to ensure the project runs smoothly without any interruptions.
- Our dedicated account manager ensured that all client expectations are met and all language teams follow client guidelines and requirements consistently.
- In addition, we appointed 3 project managers for every language to ensure consistency across translated files.
- Project managers gave regular feedback to linguists to ensure they followed client expectations on various aspects like using #hashtags, handling units or dates in public comments, using emoticons in posts, and transliterating names of people and places.
- Since collaborating with so many parties is a challenge, our PMs used our proprietary UlatusCommunicate tool to manage different linguists working on the same project and to ensure effective communication with each other.
- To deliver multiple batches for all three language pairs, project managers executed flawless management and used agile translation methods to ensure all tight deadlines are met 100%.
- To ensure that the quality is not compromised while completing this high word count project in such a short time, project managers ran quality check tools and conducted a thorough quality check of all files.
