Case Study: How a multinational law firm saves money on litigation translations

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The Challenge

Often, legal documents include a wet signature that is typically in PDF file format – and image files, in general, are not designed to be edited. When converting PDF to Word format the result is usually garbled text that is incredibly difficult to read, let alone translate. 

The situation is further complicated when PDF fonts are in a foreign language that includes diacritics, accent marks and double-byte (i.e. Chinese or Japanese) characters. As a result, standard file conversion software does not lend itself to this part of the translation process.

This is what BURG Translations encountered when a multinational law firm needed to translate 51 documents, totaling approximately 368,000 words from six languages into English. The six languages that needed to be translated were German, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish and Polish. This was also a rush project that needed to be done as soon as possible. 

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Engineering products and services company translates their website with the help of a translation glossary

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Client Profile

A global leader in rotating equipment solutions and supplying engineered technologies and services to process industries designs and manufactures a variety of products, including mechanical sealings, filtration systems, seals support systems, power transmission couplings, upstream oil & gas products, packing, dry gas seals and wet seals. Headquartered in the U.S., the company has manufacturing sites, sales and service centers and training facilities worldwide.

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How to create a translation style guide

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If you’ve already read our article on how to get a document correctly translated, how to create a glossary, or pretty much any article on how to get benefit from a language service provider (LSP), you may have noticed that collaboration is the key.  You can create a translation style guide on your own. In fact, your company may have already created one for internal purposes. However, a translation style guide is for translating, not for writing original content.  This means that a lot of the work has already been done of you and the translator, because much of the style and what the translators needs to know is already in the content itself. The purpose of the translation style guide is to address anything that the content cannot address directly. 

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The importance of writing style in document translations

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The Glossary and the translation Style Guide are the two main tools (after translation memory) that translators use to optimize the quality of their translations by taking into account client preferred terms and style.  The glossary revolves around words that are explicitly determined (exactly what source terms and target terms should be used), while the translation style guide revolves around words that are abstractly defined (eg: whether to write formally or informally).   

This article will explain how language service providers (LSPs) standardize writing style, what tool they use, and how it works.  We will also cover when it makes sense to bother with this tool.  

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What an LSP needs to know to translate a document most cost-effectively

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I think our most curious clients save the most on their translations because they end up talking to us the most about what exactly we will do for them.  The more information we have, the less assumptions we need to make, and it’s always better to err on the side of over delivering to our clients rather than under delivering.  Below is a list of everything a language service provider (LSP) needs to know needs to know to translate a document most cost-effectively:
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How to prepare for your translation project

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For clients new to the translation-buying process from a language service provider (LSP), we encounter a small variety of missteps that delay project launch.  In brief, these clients: Read more

How to get a document translated quickly

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There are times, particularly around the holidays, when new clients come to us desperate and in a rush.  Each year, we earn new clients simply by being available around the holidays, when other language service providers (LSPs) are closed and we are available and ready.  Unfortunately, these clients come to us at the last minute when they learn that their current LSP is unable to meet their deadline and now have even less time left to meet their own deadlines.  This article is dedicated to maximizing the feasibility of successfully getting documents translated well and in a rush. This article covers four tips to help you get a document translated quickly: Read more

Application of the principles of quality management in the translation industry: Engagement of people

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BURG Translations has been certified in the ISO 9001 process since 2009. This article will review the application of the principles of quality management in the translation industry and the engagement of people. It is part of a series of articles documenting our application of the ISO 9001 to our translation company. Read more

5 step to improving your translation quality results

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When you use a translation service, it’s easy to feel like you have no control over the quality of the final translation. However, it is possible to control this quality to a very high degree.

Let’s go through what you need to discuss with your LSP to ensure your next translation is the quality you want it to be: Read more

Application of the principles of quality management to the translation industry: Client focus

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This article discusses how we apply Client Focus, one of the principles of quality management, to BURG Translations. BURG Translations has been certified in the ISO 9001 process since 2009. This article is the first in a series documenting our application of the ISO 9001 to our translation company. Read more