Case studies

After a thorough screening and testing process, we were chosen by a midsize international localization 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 very loyal customer base. Their marketing communications is equally unique, thus adapting it to local requirements is really challenging. Extremely short turnaround times (often a few hours!) created another serious challenge. As a vendor with constantly available in-house team, we are able to meet expectations both in terms of quality and delivery times. The project continues, and we work closely both with the agency that manages it, and with 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 force. Both have to be also maintained in local languages. After several unsuccessful attempts to carry out this task by 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 puts the same products into two perspectives: end customer’s (publicly available on-line catalogue) and salesperson’s (confidential tutorial with additional content such as competitive analysis). Each translated tutorial or a catalogue page is carefully reviewed by our Customer’s consultants and their feedback is used for further translations. Recently, our responsibility has been extended to localization of the Customer’s Polish website home page.

A leading European diagnostic imaging system manufacturer commissions most translation of user documentation to one coordinating agency which works with partners in target countries. Ryszard Jarża Translations has been such a partner since 2008. The launch of cooperation coincided with the replacement of the customer’s head content validator in Poland. The new validator decided to organize and modernize documentation terminology. The beginning 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 in new segments immediately entailed numerous inconsistencies with existing chapters and paragraphs. As a result of tripartite consultations with the validator, coordinating agency and Ryszard Jarża Translations specialists, we have managed to work out an operational and financial model, which within 4 years has enabled nearly complete terminology update. Now the validator implements substantially less changes as compared to the beginning of our cooperation. All indicators, both subjective and objective, clearly bring out 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 localize a software product they had recently added to their portfolio as a result of an acquisition of another company. The product, a complex asset management system, was about to be implemented in several Polish large 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 during the whole translation cycle. A testing phase immediately followed the localization, 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 this time is translated in Czech, Hungarian, and Russian as well.

At the end of 2011, a leading business software vendor (our customer since 2007) asked us about the possibility to localize a comprehensive small and medium enterprise software package. 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, localization was to take place in the online system with the use of unique tools. Within just two months we prepared a glossary and agreed it with the local experts. Due to the project’s large scale, we could not manage the entire translation process only with our internal resources. That is why in February 2012 we organized in our Wrocław office several training sessions 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 comfortable communication platform. The translation process completed in June 2012 and the customer expressed its highly positive opinion with regard to the “efficiency, flexibility and engagement” of our team.

In late 2006, our Customer, a global multilingual localization company, contracted Ryszard Jarza Translations to execute a series of linguistic tests on a Polish version of a well-known creative software consisting of graphic, publishing and Web development applications. Before the project started, our testers participated in a training at end customer's European localization centre. The testing process turned out to be considerably challenging, as the test scenarios were initially developed for functional testing and required very high 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 brought success and Polish was ranked among the best languages. In 2008, the same Customer approached us with a request to localize the next version of the same software suite. This time, our services include both translation and testing.