Client Interview

Senior Marketing Manager of American Chemical Society

Interview with Senior Marketing Manager of American Chemical Society

Karen Yeo, Senior Marketing Manager, Asia Pacific

Based in Singapore, Karen has been responsible for the role of Senior Marketing Manager, Asia Pacific. In this capacity, she takes care of the development and execution of marketing strategies and activities to increase brand awareness, value-perception, and market share in the region. She blends revenue drive marketing activities and sales support with events management, community outreach, networking, channel marketing and local marketing collateral development. Karen is an experience Marketing Lead with a demonstrated history of working in the non-profit organization management industry.

First of all, could you tell us about your history and career leading up to your current path?

Karen Yeo

Prior to joining ACS Publications, Karen was a Sales & Marketing Operations Manager, APAC at McGraw-Hill Education working on implementation of value mapping tool in pricing and distributors scoring models across Asia Pacific. She also spent reasonable years in Cambridge University Press as Senior Marketing Manager covering Asia Pacific.

ACS is recognized as a leading publisher of scientific information on chemistry. Your 200+ peer-reviewed journals are ranked the most-trusted, most-cited and most-read. Can you tell us in short about the mission of ACS?

Karen Yeo

We empower our members to advance chemistry, elevate their career potential, expand their networks, inspire future generations, collaborate globally and build communities that provide scientific solutions. Our mission is to advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and its people. Our vision is to improve people’s lives through the transforming power of chemistry.

ACS helps members/researchers connect with world’s largest scientific community. So in this context, can you please tell us about the regular translation project you do with Ulatus?

Karen Yeo

ACS Insights is our periodic newsletter that we send to our members containing the latest events from ACS. It’s important for us to be in touch with our subscribers and keep them engaged. Since many of our subscribers are Japanese also, we want our newsletters in Japanese to go to them. So we get our newsletters translated into Japanese to increase the readership and viewership in Japan. We felt that if our readers received our communications in their own language, it would be more appealing to them and our open and click rates would vastly improve.

Also sometimes I need translation of Instruction Manuals, Other Manuals, Catalogs. Sometimes it is Press Release, Brochure, Leaflets, so as you can see its very varied.  

ACS offers an extensive collection of peer-reviewed eBooks that shine a light on a wealth of topics relating to technical disciplines, public policy, and chemistry education. So how important was it for the translation team to have expertise in chemistry for you?

Karen Yeo

The content we want translated is very niche and technical, hence it is very important for the translator to have the relevant subject knowledge. Also natural expression from the viewpoint of SME is required, something that can be achieved only by expert linguists.

Throughout the project, you have been emphasizing on great fluency in the translation. So much so, that its almost like a transcreation project. So can you please explain a little in detail about the importance of fluency in this project?

Karen Yeo

Fluency is the most important factor for us. This document is a newsletter article for readers (researchers). Output styles should be edited for effective impact and readability just like news and treated as articles in science magazines. It is very much like a Transcreation task and not just word by word translation. We wanted the deliverables to be used for publication without any revisions by us. The edits of the translation had to be done like an editor of a magazine. To this extent, fluency and smooth readability was important for us, along with technical expertise.

Did you see any improvement in readership after you started translating your newsletters in Japanese for the Japanese speaking audience?

Karen Yeo

Localizing the newsletter in Japanese not only improved the open rates of the email, it also improved the engagement our readers were having with our emails. More users were reading and reacting to our newsletters now. The objective we had of improving our engagement with our Japanese readers was more than met. Our readership base is about 14,000 & growing.

You have been regularly working with Ulatus for many years now. What were the challenges in getting your newsletters translated and how did Ulatus help overcome them?

Karen Yeo

With Japanese translation, taking care of cultural nuances was very important. Considering that the newsletter contains niche and technical information makes conveying it in another language even more difficult. Ulatus stays in constant connection with us and overtime has developed a comfortable process for us to get the translation we need on time and with the expected quality. As I said, the text is very technical but it needs to sound very smooth and fluid when translated. So achieving this fluency + technical accuracy was not easy, something that Ulatus has been successfully able to do for us.

Also I always request you to refer to the URL links entailed to each article for the understanding of the idea of article. I understand its not easy to translate 100 words but refer to 1000’s of words as reference links to ensure good translation of 100 words for example. But I really appreciate Ulatus taking that effort for every article that I send.

You have chosen the highest translation service of Ulatus which is Translation + Cross check + Transcreation Japanese editing. Highest service means highest price also. Do you feel the output you get is worth the price?

Karen Yeo

I would think so. I know what I ask for is not straightforward, something that not everyone can deliver. So it’s the highest service that I have chosen, and the deliverable is also of the highest quality. Also Crimson is very receptive to feedback and makes sure what I want is delivered to me, even if it needs some iterations (at no cost). So in that way, their support is very much appreciated.

How happy have you been with our services so far? 

Karen Yeo

We have to send the newsletters out every month at the stipulated time. We approach Ulatus with the content that needs to be translated and you always manage to deliver the translation on time with the expected quality. The customer support is very prompt and useful, thereby making things very easy. The translation reads as if the newsletter was prepared in Japanese for a science magazine, and that’s means our objective is achieved.

Would you recommend Ulatus to people you know?

Karen Yeo

Most definitely. The efforts that they take to make sure a client gets what he or she wants is commendable. They don’t work off-the-shelf that we do this, we don’t do this. They always try to find out from clients what they want and offer it to the best of their capability.


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