Helping A Local Business Go Global

I enjoyed working with Krissy right away! It was very easy to gauge her enthusiasm for their company and for the work we were about to do. ASM had never translated their content before so it was a great opportunity for me to educate Krissy in the process and the best approach to help them reach their Spanish-speaking customers.

Translation of the catalog went along pretty well – we work in InDesign quite frequently. Based on distribution, we were able to determine the target dialect and also other components such as measurement conversion. Our multilingual desktop publishing (DTP) team is very skilled in making sure the translated text fits properly within a layout (accounting for expansion, etc.)

When it came to the website, Krissy wanted it all to come together with minimal input on her end. We were able to work with her web design and development team. My role throughout the process was to communicate with the client and update them and also with Bill and our translation proxy support team. As Bill mentions, we had some back-and-forth during this process. Our goal is to manage and meet client expectations. We knew that the goal was for the client to host the Spanish site. However, the translated images were not carrying over to the Spanish site using the plugin. We troubleshooted back and forth to try and make this happen. What made this easier was communication on all sides. Everyone was responsive and our goals were aligned – complete the website and finish with a product that would “speak the language” of ASM’s Spanish customers.

What also makes the translation proxy solution great is the ability to check for updates. As ASM updates their English site, our crawl is able to pick up these updates and provide an immediate quote.

I worked as the project manager for website translation. Caitlin brought me in right at the planning stage from the first phone call until the site was tested and ready to go!

We presented the client with three options for translating their website. They chose “Option 2” which was to install the translation proxy plugin. Interactive Media Consulting would host the translations on their end. This meant that the process would be a collaborative effort between our translation proxy team, the client, and their web team. The process started out very simple. The plugin was installed, and we had the content translated. We were able to set up the domain name for the Spanish site so that it read the translations properly.

One issue we had to fix were the ads on the home page. These need to be handled separately. The images were created in InDesign and were not picked up by the initial web crawl. Once we had these images translated, they were not showing up on the proxy site using the plugin. (Meaning they were still in English.) In order for the site to be fully-translated, we would need to find a solution. After much troubleshooting, we decided that the best option would be to switch to “Option 1” where LinguaLinx hosts the site so that the ads and images are fully supported.

Overall, it was a team effort. Our proxy solution team was very responsive as was the team at Interactive Media Consulting. This was very helpful as we tried many fixes to make Option #2 work (because that was what the client wanted). In the end, though, we agreed that Option 1 would work best for the clients needs.