Financial Case Study

 Summary

Our client in this case study is a large US company that is famous for its financial advisors. To prepare for their expansion into the Japanese market, they wanted to hire dozens of financial advisors from a range of financial companies in Japan. They planned to develop a new market in Japan by training these advisors with the know-how they had cultivated in the USA. The company had confidence in its training materials, which had a proven track record in the USA. They asked TOIN to translate the materials into Japanese so that the Japanese financial advisors could understand them.

However, the Project Manager felt that if the documents were translated directly into Japanese, the training would not be a success because of cultural differences. So in addition to the translation, he suggested to the client that the text itself be adapted for Japanese readers. The client agreed, and we performed the new writing in parallel with the translation, producing training materials that fully lived up to the client's expectations.

 Challenges

• Training for Japanese financial advisors
• Adapting English-language training materials from a US-market orientation to a Japanese audience
• Need to define the terminology for financial advisor services, a relatively new concept in Japan

 Solutions

• We recommended a Japanese-style training program based around a team leader, instead of American-style group training
• We divided into separate parts the sections to be translated and those to be rewritten in Japanese, performing both tasks in parallel
• We defined new terminology by working together with experienced translators and the client team leader

 Results

• We created a training program that was relevant to the Japanese financial advisors
• We made the translated text available for reuse by storing it in a translation memory database

 Translation is not enough...

This was the reaction of TOIN's Project Manager when he first looked over the training materials we received from the client. The material contained many references to law and commercial practices in the US financial industry, which would not mean much to the Japanese audience. Furthermore, the training technique was an American style, with students divided into small groups to share their opinions before giving presentations to the whole class. This teaching method would be unfamiliar to Japanese people, who are used to teacher-led lessons. As such, we proposed dividing the material into sections that could be translated and sections to be rewritten. The new text was written directly into Japanese without being translated.

 Full utilization of translation memory tools

Whether in the financial or any other field, training materials usually contain many duplicated sentences. From our first analysis of the text as a whole, it was clear that we could translate 50 percent of the document simply by duplicating sentences or replacing single words. We used the TRADOS translation memory tool, with a translator experienced in the financial field translating the new sentences. These sentences were then automatically reused by TRADOS, which in addition to reducing costs and time, also helps ensure text consistency. Terminology is the basic building block of any translation: our experienced translators worked together with the client team leader to create a glossary, which we then used for maintaining quality in the translation.

 New sections were written together with the client

The TOIN team decided to create training materials that the students would truly understand by incorporating case studies that would be familiar to Japanese financial advisors. We asked the client to provide us with some of their many case studies, which we then used as the base for the new written material. In addition, whenever we had any doubts about the training method, the client's Japanese team and US team would discuss the issues involved and provide us with instructions for changing the material. The legal department at the US head office also listed the information that could not be changed to avoid legal problems arising from the service contents and other explanations, and these sections were accompanied with a "according to US law" explanatory note.

By producing a document that was a hybrid between translated and newly written material and creating a training platform for the Japanese team leader, we were very successful in what was our first attempt to provide training materials for Japanese financial advisors. Thereafter, even though there were repeated changes to the material, by using the translation memory we were able to keep the sections requiring new translation to less than 20 percent of the total. In addition, other documents required by the financial advisors after starting to work at the client were similar to those that were used during training. As such, the same translation memory could be used to quickly produce consistent documents for other purposes: a useful by-product of the original project.