Jason Fink is Corporate Communications Manager for Celanese Corporation and has been with them since March 2007. His responsibilities include oversight for online communications, which includes internet and intranet design and support. Prior to joining Celanese, Jason was a communications project leader for United Parcel Service responsible for the internal/external communications department for the North Texas District of UPS.

On June 4th, I was a co-panelist with Jason at one of SDL’s best-practice localization events.  This is a transcript of part of Jason’s Q&A session.

Question:

 What are some of your biggest challenges you have faced in localization at Celanese?

 Answer:

 Our biggest challenge at Celanese is maintaining a strategic view of translations. Too often we get caught in the day-to-day of, “It’s got to be done at a certain time. I have a timeframe and I want it done accurately.” At Celanese we have sometimes stop and ask ourselves, “What is the true purpose of translating this material?”

 For example, we translate the Business Conduct Guidelines every year. When I started we had hundreds of pages on our website, so we were translating each and every page for multiple languages online. We took a step back and thought strategically about this process. We accepted that most people did not read every single page of the Business Conduct Guidelines on the website.  Most people, if they wanted to read the entire document would print it out. Looking at the BCGs from a high-level view, and the “why” behind our needs to translate we agreed that localization of the BCGs was still important, however we decided to PDF everything.

  Now there are twelve sections online, still fully localized, but we have reduced server costs since we do not have hundreds of web pages out there taking up space. When we updates, we simply upload the new document and we are good to go, which is a strong reduction in our “time-to-market.”

 We found we were right to translate the content, but there was no good reason “why” we were doing it the old way. The new way, using PDFs, made better time, resource and financial sense and the material was put in a format that was easier for our employees to use.

 Second, in keeping with that theme, it is important to understand “what” you are trying to achieve with the translation, and not get caught up in the metrics.

 As an example, our company was releasing a localized global employee survey into five different languages. I did not measure the success by the accuracy of the translation, not that accuracy was not important, but the key was we wanted 70% return on the survey from our employees.  All of the materials developed around the survey were to get you to take it. So when my boss asked me, “What was the ‘value’ of the translations?”, I told him the goal was 70% return and I came in at 75%. One of the reasons behind that was the translation of the survey, because if someone cannot read the survey, they cannot take the survey. Additionally, if the site directors in the other countries do not have their talking points translated they will not have the same impact.

 I did not pitch it to him on the word count, i.e. the translation was 99% accurate. What I say is “you had a business goal, we exceeded it, and translation was one of the main tools that allowed it to happen.”

 If I am translating safety material, I do not judge success by timelines met, but by the number of injuries we reduce.  I take that to my boss and say “part of the reason we hit the reduction was the translation process.” Far too often people become too process-focused when the conversation of translation comes up and they lose sight of the reasons “why” you are translating.