Archives for January 2022

Winter Olympics: Běijīng huānyíng nǐ

26.1.2022 by Delingua

The Beijing Winter Olympics are just around the corner! They will take place on 4–20 February 2022 and both actual and couch athletes have been eagerly awaiting for the games to begin, especially now with the coronavirus pandemic and the increased amount of time people spend at home. From the Finnish perspective, there is always particular excitement associated with the Winter Olympics because, as a winter sports nation, we have a much better chance of winning medals at the Winter Olympics than at the Summer Olympics.

At the Winter Olympics, athletes will compete in 15 disciplines in seven sports. The total number of events is 109. There will also be completely new events, such as women’s monobob and mixed team competitions in ski jumping, freestyle skiing, snowboard cross and short track speed skating.

The Beijing Winter Olympics have also introduced some new things related to language. Read more below!

Winter Olympics term base

China has built the first browser-based term base (Olympic Winter Games Terminology) in the history of the Winter Olympics, containing as many as 132,000 terms. In addition, the organisers have published the Terms of Olympic Winter Sports dictionary, which contains 3,000 key terms associated with winter sports and the Olympics.

Terms are published in eight languages: Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Korean, Russian, German and Spanish. Go and have a look!

Communications with the help of AI

At the Beijing Winter Olympics, language barriers will also be broken with the aid of language technology. In September 2019, it was announced that the Chinese language technology company iFLYTEK was selected to provide automated translation and transcription services for the Winter Olympics.

iFLYTEK specialises in artificial intelligence, speech recognition and natural language processing. In recent years, the company has also launched consumer-oriented machine translation engines. According to the company’s official press release, its aim, in alignment with the Olympic ideals, is to help athletes and guests engage and celebrate the event, without being held back by the communication barriers.

From Chinese characters to pinyin text

At the beginning of the year, the residents of Beijing woke up to a surprise: In official signs, the English words had been replaced by pinyin, i.e. the romanised versions of the Chinese characters. For instance, instead of the English word “station”, the sign had been changed to “Zhan”, which is the romanised version of the Chinese logogram. The English metro station names had also been changed into pinyin: “Olympic Park” now reads “Aolinpike Gongyuan” and terminal 2 of Beijing Airport now reads “2 Hao Hangzhanlou”. Fortunately, the English translations can still be found below in parentheses!

This change in the run-up to the Winter Olympics has generated a lot of discussion in China. People have wondered who the change was made for. The Chinese hardly need pinyin as they generally understand Chinese logograms. On the other hand, foreigners living in China hardly understand pinyin any more than they do Chinese characters. In addition, visitors attending the Olympics probably won’t use the city’s metro due to strict coronavirus restrictions.

Pinyin is the international romanisation system of Chinese names. Its use was approved at the conference of the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names in 1977. In China, the system has been in place since 1958. In 1979, the Finnish Language Board also recommended the use of the pinyin system in Finnish texts. 

We wish the best of luck especially to the Finnish team competing at the Beijing Winter Olympics!

好好儿干啊

Your best friend at a language service provider

19.1.2022 by Delingua

Have you ever found yourself responsible for having a company’s website translated into 30 different languages? Ever needed an urgent translation of a press release into English or have files in several different formats translated? What about struggling with a massive localisation project or having difficulty arranging interpreting for a multilingual conference because you simply didn’t know how to handle it in a technically smart, cost-effective and high-quality way?

When faced with challenges like these, who can you turn to?

Heroes of the hustle and bustle

Translators translate, but at a language service provider, the reins are firmly held by project managers, – or Translation and Interpreting Services Managers, as we call them. Their main task is to identify customer needs, create a project plan for each assignment, find the best resources and steer the project through to its successful completion. The Translation or Interpreting Services Manager finds the best available language experts for the work and ensures that the customer’s expectations are met. The successful completion of a translation or interpreting assignment, large or small, is in their hands – which is no trifling matter, even if it might seem so.

Project management at a language service provider is typically hectic, from morning to evening. Inquiries, deliveries, meetings, urgent projects and all manner of challenges bombard project managers from every conceivable direction. Project managers must keep their cool and make sure they don’t drop the ball. Recently, a colleague told me that during just one day they had written or received more than 100 emails, to or from customers, language experts or other people involved in their projects.

In addition to technical knowledge, Translation and Interpreting Services Managers are also required to have excellent language and customer service skills. What is more, they need to be quick-witted, have the ability to tolerate pressure and possess excellent communication skills, among other essential qualities. And, of course, the ability to understand and empathise with the customer’s needs and situation.

How we stand out from the rest

According to our customer feedback survey conducted in November 2021, up to 99.3% of our customers feel that Delingua provides excellent customer service. So that we can maintain such a good customer experience, we also ask what sets us apart from other language service providers. Year after year, the answer remains the same: speed and customer service.

Above all, it is our customer service team that gets the highest praise. In their feedback, customers point to the personal nature of how our team responds to orders as well as customer relationship management in general. Doing business is easy, questions are answered quickly and translations are delivered on time. Customers appreciate that they get what we promise to deliver.

It feels as though customers and service managers have become friends.

You are important to us

Many people associate language service providers with translators. It may not always occur to you that there is usually a customer service professional behind everything, a person who believes you and your needs are important, even before the language work itself even begins. Without taking anything away from our valuable translators and other language experts, we wanted to make our project managers the stars of our company video.

No matter how automated project management at a language service provider becomes, it is inherently a business of likes, in which every customer wants to be heard and seen in exactly the way they want. Our mission is to make sure that, as our customer, you feel you are important to us.

Here comes hyper-localisation

4.1.2022 by Katja Virtanen

The term “localisation” is becoming familiar to increasingly more people. In addition to translating text, localisation also takes into account the integration of the text into the language and culture of the target country. Localisation is typically discussed in connection with software and user interfaces, but integration is done for all types of content with the purpose of achieving the best possible user experience.

But what is hyper-localisation, a phenomenon adopted by marketers in particular?

What is hyper-localisation?

Hyper-localisation takes localisation even further. In hyper-localisation, data from both linguistic and geographical areas as well as from individual users are taken into account in content creation in order to adapt the products and the offering better for the target group.

For this kind of targeting to be possible, hyper-localisation always requires in-depth research data on the target group. In addition, hyper-localisation is always based on a clear hyper-localisation strategy. For example, a company’s localisation strategy may cover German language areas and localisation in German, but if you want to hyper-localise and strategically target marketing to 18–24-year-old Swiss people, the content must be targeted at them, and the language variant and style must be just right.

A hyper-localisation decision should not be made lightly, as by adopting this strategy you might turn your back on many other target groups or end up running a number of different hyper-localised marketing campaigns.

Canva – Truly local

Canva is an online design tool that enables businesses and private users to create professional-looking graphics. Canva contains over one million images and a great variety of different graphics and fonts. Canva, which was founded in Australia, has grown and expanded overseas very strongly over the last few years: Currently, more than 82% of Canva’s net sales come from non-English-speaking markets.

As Canva is available in 190 countries in over 100 languages or language variants, Canva’s localisation is managed by an entire Global Services team. According to team leader Rachel Carruthers, Canva’s strategic mission is to ensure that every Canva user’s experience of the service is “truly local”. In practice, this means hyper-localising the content and localising the user interface and usability according to each country and language area.

Hyper-localisation based on market data

For Canva, hyper-localisation means a shift of focus from breadth of access to the full depth of experience. The design tool has not only been localised in different languages but it also takes into account, for example, the needs and preferences of the target groups in addition to conventions in different countries.

Based on the collected marketing data, Canva has found that there may be significant differences in preferences within the same language area. While Argentinian users, for example, prefer a more minimalist style for images in line with the preferences of Japanese and German users, Mexican and Colombian users prefer a more maximalist style, despite also being Spanish speakers. That’s why the content of Canva may vary even within the same language area.

Canva has also divided countries into those where it is more customary to respect the country’s own culture and traditions in the selection of images and graphics. In this sense, Canva wants to communicate to its Japanese, Italian and Brazilian users that the program can also be used to express oneself and one’s own culture. For this reason, the image bank contains more local colours, images and graphics in these areas. However, in Germany and Korea, for example, the markets are rather outward-looking, and users like to adopt international influences. In these market areas, Canva focuses more on informing users about the features of the program and the possibilities it provides.

In some countries, such as Japan and Germany, a more formal language is used, whereas in Mexico and Colombia, for example, the register is informal. The linguistic differences have been acknowledged in Canva’s Instagram ads, where texts have been hyper-localised based on the marketing data.

The benefits of hyper-localisation

According to Rachel Carruthers, Canva has clearly benefitted from hyper-localisation. With hyper-localisation, the use of Canva has increased by 8.9%, and there is a nearly 39.3% uplift in trial conversions. Similarly, hyper-localised Instagram ads have seen an increase in revenue of over 200%, while Cost Per Trial (CPT) prices have fallen by up to 80%.

There is a difference between localisation and hyper-localisation. Hyper-localisation is particularly suitable for targeted marketing within a defined group (niche) within a market segment. Hyper-localisation is also useful when selling to consumers directly. In other cases, however, carefully implemented localisation is likely to be enough, as standard localisation also acknowledges specific features, such as the language variant, conventions and the more specific target group.