Chemical Case Study

 Summary

TOIN successfully completed a large project for a company in the chemical industry by working in advance with the client to select translators and formulate measures for ensuring quality.

 Challenges

• Few translators specialize in the chemical field
• Translation quality management is difficult because the field involves leading-edge technology

 Solutions

• TOIN held advance consultations so the client could evaluate potential translators based on their work history
• We assigned a Subject Matter Expert (SME) to the team
• We started with a small project which was then checked in preparation for the large project

 Conclusion

• The client's advice enabled us to construct an appropriate system
• Our advance preparations allowed us to operate even in a field with few translators

 Case Study

The client in this case study is a large chemical analysis equipment and software company with its head office in the USA. They were seeking a translation that would accurately express highly specialized technical content, but their project was too large for their in-house translation team and their usual translation agency. They came to us to ask if we could find a way to translate the project while satisfying both the quality and high-volume requirements.

In truth, although TOIN did have experience with chemical analysis equipment, the chemical field itself is so wide that we did not have a sufficient number of specialist translators in the area required. Since the actual start of the project was six months away, we repeatedly held consultations with the client. The client staff of course had a high degree of specialist knowledge, so we showed them the work histories and experience of various translators, from which they chose the ones to be included in the project team.

TOIN has a department called Vendor Relations (VR) whose role is to recruit translators and hire appropriate personnel. VR recruited translators for this project by focusing on those who graduated from university with a chemical-related degree or had experience in working at a chemical company. We found more people than we initially expected and received the approval of the client. Recruiting translators by itself would not enable TOIN to deliver translations with the required specialist knowledge and up to the necessary quality standards, so we also brought in an external SME to the project.

We asked the client to start us off with a small translation project to let us learn some of the required technical knowledge and check the terminology. From this we could ascertain the competence of each translator and verify the workflows within the project team. We then started on the main project and were able to deliver a high quality translation of very difficult technical information.

With the success of this project we gained invaluable experience in making the proper preparations for a technical field in which there are few translators.