The request from major international software developer Company C was to help create an appealing portal site for use by engineers. Here KI doesn't only provide mere translation, the project team formed to develop a site that draws in readers becomes the fulcrum of its management.
Problems
Company C, a major IT software developer, decided to create a portal site to host wide ranging technical information aimed at engineers. Most of this information took the form of documents that required translation, and due to a wildly unpredictable volume of work, a situation whereby a single company could not deal with such a workload arose. As a result, great pressure was placed on the managers of Company C to balance the work schedule between translation companies while somehow maintaining quality.
They also carried the burden of schedule coordination with each product suite's manager, budget control, and quality maintenance, meaning that it became difficult to focus on the original target of creating a highly appealing portal.
Solving Problems
Company C enlisted the help of KI on this matter, and a system that could deal with the sometimes five fold increase in workload between the busy and quiet periods was established. To ensure that quality was kept to a set level even in times of a hugely increased volume of work, KI developed an original resource management system and dispatched staff members to Company C tasked with managing communications between the company and KI. Portal documents that were divided between numerous translation companies were left to KI to deal with and in doing so, the burden of dealing with workload, deadlines and quality maintenance between the numerous translation companies placed on Company C’s managers was greatly eased.
A system that ensured translations were consistently provided at a set quality level was implemented and through collaboration, Company C and KI progressed to the next phase of the project. While stable provision of the technical translations that formed the foundation of the portal continued, the overall focus shifted to easy to read documents and blogs intended for newcomers to technology and people who had not yet purchased Company C’s products.
Although the project had progressed smoothly until this point, unforeseen complaints began to arise that the easy to read documents were lacking in naturalness, difficult to understand, and thus not so easy to read, meaning they did not appeal to the readers.
The cause of this problem was investigated immediately and it came to light that the information sharing between the dispatched KI representative and the KI managers was lacking flexibility, and the customer’s intentions were not being correctly communicated to KI and its translators. KI realized that whereas notation, style, and terminology can be guided by specific rules, the tone and mood of texts are difficult to define as standards, and saw that the problem needed to be solved by adopting an approach that separated “preference” from “quality”.
Solution
Through numerous in-depth consultations between Company C managers and KI representatives, and by KI representative attending Company C’s internal meetings, mistakes were kneaded out of draft documents, and great efforts to match each aspect (writing style, tone, etc) of the text to the preferences of the readers were made. The effect of this process gradually manifested itself, and blogs and other translations began to be accepted with satisfaction by Company C.
KI hopes that through continuously attempting to gain an insight into the tastes of the customer, into preferences that are fundamentally difficult to communicate with words such as writing style and tone, we can continue to contribute to the development of the customer’s website.
