Case studies

After a thorough screening and testing process, we were chosen by a midsize international localisation agency as the primary Polish vendor for their main customer’s website and marketing translations. The end customer is a global IT and digital media company with a unique brand image and a very loyal customer base. Their marketing communications is equally unique; adapting it to local requirements is a fascinating challenge. Extremely short turnaround times (often a few hours!) created another serious challenge. As a vendor with a constantly available in-house team, we are able to meet expectations both in terms of quality and delivery times. The project is ongoing, and we work closely with both the agency that manages it and the end customer’s consultants.

Our customer, a global software and business consultancy company, maintains an on-line software product catalogue, as well as a series of related tutorials for their partners’ sales forces. Both have to be maintained in local languages. After several unsuccessful attempts to carry out this task using global multilingual vendors, the customer decided to order individual languages directly from smaller in-country vendors. Since 2006, we have been responsible for Polish. The project is unique, because the material often presents the same products from two perspectives: the end customer’s (via the publicly available online catalogue) and the salesperson’s (via confidential tutorials with additional content, such as competitive analysis). Each translated tutorial or catalogue page is carefully reviewed by our customer’s consultants, and their feedback is used for further translations. Recently, our role has been extended to include localisation of the customer’s Polish website.

A leading European diagnostic imaging system manufacturer commissions most translation of user documentation from one coordinating agency, which works with partners in the relevant target countries. Ryszard Jarża Translations has been one of these partners since 2008. The start of our cooperation coincided with the replacement of the customer’s head content validator in Poland. The new validator decided to organise and modernise the company’s documentation terminology. The start of this process proved to be very problematic since the customer’s business model assumed full leverage of existing approved translation segments without further review. Each terminology change introduced in new segments immediately led to inconsistencies with existing chapters and paragraphs. As a result of tripartite consultations with the validator, the coordinating agency and Ryszard Jarża Translations specialists, we have managed to work out an operational and financial model that has enabled an almost complete terminology update within four years. Now the validator implements substantially fewer changes when compared to the early days of our cooperation. All indicators, both subjective and objective, clearly highlight the increased quality of translations delivered to final customers.

In March 2007, one of our customers, a leading global IT and business consultancy company, turned to us with a request to localise a software product they had recently added to their portfolio following the acquisition of another company. The product, a complex asset management system, was about to be implemented in several large Polish industrial plants. In close co-operation with the customer’s local development and implementation teams, we developed a workflow to translate UI strings stored in Oracle databases using standard CAT tools. The customer’s implementation consultants were involved in the project throughout the whole translation cycle. A testing phase immediately followed localisation, and the Polish version of the software was put into production in September 2007. Polish was the first and only CEE language for this product in 2007, and since January 2008 we have been working on the next version, which is also being translated into Czech, Hungarian and Russian.

At the end of 2011, a leading business software vendor (our customer since 2007) asked us about the possibility of localising a comprehensive software package for small and medium-sized enterprises. This software, offered as SaaS, supports financial, human resources, sales, purchasing, customer support and supply chain management processes. As with all other products offered by this customer, localisation was to take place in the online system with the use of unique tools. Within just two months we had prepared a glossary and had it agreed with local experts. Due to the large scale of the project, we could not manage the entire translation process just with our internal resources. That is why in February 2012 we organised several training sessions in our Wrocław office to introduce a wider group of freelance translators to the customer’s tools and expectations. Also, we established our internal discussion groups for the freelancers involved in the project, which allowed us to create a fast and convenient communication platform. The translation process was completed in June 2012 and the customer expressed their highly positive opinion with regard to the “efficiency, flexibility and engagement” of our team.

In late 2006, our customer, a global multilingual localisation company, contracted Ryszard Jarża Translations to execute a series of linguistic tests on a Polish version of a well-known piece of creative software consisting of graphic, publishing and web development applications. Before the project started, our testers participated in training at the end customer's European localisation centre. The testing process turned out to be a considerable challenge, as the test scenarios were initially developed for functional testing and required very advanced technical skills. The testers had to prepare their environments, configure local web servers, and perform a number of other technical tasks with very limited documentation available. Nevertheless, the project was successful and Polish was ranked among the best languages. In 2008, the same customer approached us with a request to localise the next version of the same software suite. This time, our services included both translation and testing.