betterlanguages.com were delighted to be finalists in two categories in last nights Nottingham Evening Post Business Awards 2010: Nottinghamshire Small Business of the Year, and Best Use of IT and Communications. We were up against stiff competition, and were the only company to be finalists in two categories. The Awards Ceremony was held at the Nottingham Council House in The Old Market Square on Thursday night. IT and communications are clearly vital to our business as both clients and suppliers are in different parts of the world, and we both send and receive work by e-mail, as well as using FTP services for larger files. We currently work with translators in over 27 countries (and counting), spread over 5 continents. Using in-country translators in most instances ensures best use of up to date and accurate terminology in the target language. We say in most cases, because translation is always about understanding both source and target languages, in some countries there is a lack of exposure to outside languages, making it difficult to find good local translators. We are very rigorous in our selection processes, and also work closely with our translators to ensure efficicient and accurate work.

In the small business category, we were up against much larger companies, so were very pleased to be finalists. We were recognised for improvements in both turnover and profitability, in a time of difficult trading conditions due to the recession, last year we grew by 37%, winning significant key accounts including  M&S, Thorntons, and Iceland Foods. better languages is very proud of its links with the city of Nottingham, including offering a local Nottingham translation service.

We are pleased to have completed a move of our betterlanguages.com domain to new hosting, hopefully this should significantly improve the site visitor experience, with pages loading much faster. We had a bit of a nightmare with our previous hosting providers, as anyone who followed our Twitter campaign will know. The site was down for nearly 5 days, with no adequate explanation from Network Solutions. We have now moved to UK hosting with UKFast, and are watching intently to see if this improves our site performance in the SERPS. We think it will, as Google is alleged to be taking greater note of load speed. What’s better for a spider, is usually better for human readers too, and we’ve already noticed improved pay per click performance, and lower bounce rate. We’ll let you know what happens next.

We are members of EMITA the East Midlands International Trade Association,  an invaluable resource for businesses involved in, or thinking about international trade. Last night’s event was about trading with the Baltic states, and included presentations from Trade Officers from Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. There is always more to learn about different countries, their economies, and about local culture. Yesterday’s event was no exception, and copies of the presentations are available on the EMITA website. The event was also useful for networking with other businesses, and we met staff from as diverse businesses as Castle Pumps – who unsurprisingly manufacture lots of kinds of pumps; a company that supplies milk to schools, and another translation agency.

We translate into Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian, not currently in high volume, but we know that one of our retail clients is active in the area, so watch this space!

Do you work for one of Nottingham’s larger companies, or know someone who does? Working with some of the countries leading brands like Iceland Foods, Mothercare, and M&S is great, but betterlanguages would like to talk to decision makers in key Nottingham businesses who may need translation services either now or in the future. “We have translation customers all over the country”, says Mike Hunter, CEO, but whilst we have some smaller local clients, don’t currently work with many of the larger Nottingham based companies. We know that companies like Boots, Experian and ClinPhone all have need of translation services, and we would like to talk to them.”

better languages works largely with the retail sector translating labels and packaging and product user guides, but also translates websites, brochures and other marketing materials, as well as providing legal translation, and technical translation. The business has won a number of awards over the last few years, and is currently shortlisted in 2 categories for the Nottingham Evening Post Business Awards 2010.

“We work very hard at customer service” says Mike, “and have seen significant growth over the last couple of years, growing right through the recession. We believe we have a winning formula of a high quality service, with the kind of fast turnaround that larger businesses need. We also offer supporting services such as desk top publishing, and printing completed translation work.”

If anyone has any ideas of how to engage with some of the larger local businesses, we would love to hear from you.

I went to an excellent talk by Paul Walsh at Nottingham Business School yesterday. Having heard him speak previously, I expected a high quality presentation. If like me you have never heard of Diageo, you will almost certainly have heard of some of their brands, including Guinness, Johnie Walker, and Smirnoff… Speaking largely about marketing in a digital environment, he stressed the importance of both Twitter and Facebook, and gave some interesting examples of managing brand image, and engaging with consumers through social media. An interesting statistic quoted was that 47% of TV viewers in the UK pay for advertisement free viewing, with the rise of Sky plus for example, you can watch when you want to, and fast forward the ads. The focus now is very much on dialogue and consumer engagement therefore. Facinating talk, though very business to consumer focused, I think there are still things to learn for business to business. We’ll have to give some thought to our use of Twitter and Facebook for engaging with businesses interested in translation services.

OK, only kidding, but it would be great wouldn’t it? We’ve just signed up for the “Compete for” website, its free to register, and any UK company wanting to tender for public sector business should sign up. The slight snag is that because of our current size, we’re probably not ready for a multi-million pound translation contract yet. However we can deal with large volume jobs, and multiple languages. Here are a few translation stats from last year:

• Most translated language: Hungarian. Its easy to assume that we would translate larger volumes of standard European languages like French or German, but actually we had a client wanting a large volume of Hungarian, and that skewed the stats. There has been a definite trend of more demand for central European languages, and we’ve also translated lots of Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Romanian.  Previous years winners were Simplified Chinese in 2008, and Flemish in 2007.
• Highest volume tight deadline job: 62,000 words into Polish in 5 working days. Not our recommended way to work, but it got our client out of a hole when they had been let down by another agency. To give an idea, its around 6 weeks work for a translator in 5 working days, it was only achievable because we had a team of two translators with a shared database of terminology working very long days.
• Largest number of languages on a single project: 40. That kept the project manager busy. In theory it doesn’t take much longer for a multi-language project than a single language translation, as all the translation team work simultaneously, however there is a much bigger co-ordination and document compilation task for the project manager.
• Smallest value single order: about £20 + VAT for a very short text in a single language.
• Most interesting project: translation for The Commonwealth War Graves Commission English to French, following the find of a First World War mass grave at Fromelles, in France. Any student of history would love this type of project, and our lead translator has extensive experience of this type of marketing and military history translation.
• Strangest enquiry: this has to go to the person who rang us up and said “I need a quote please, not sure what languages, and I can’t send you the text as it hasn’t been written yet, don’t have any clue how long it will be….” Even a few basic facts will make our task easier!
• Biggest achievement: ISO 9001 quality assurance, well not quite, we have the system up and running and are awaiting accreditation, but its been a lot of work, so the champaign is on ice ready for when we achieve accreditation.
• Talking of champaign, we’ve been shortlisted in the Nottingham Evening Post business awards, in two categories, best use of IT and communications, and Small Business of the Year. The ceremony i on 1st July at the Council House. Win or lose, its great to be nominated.

OK, must get back to that translation contract application…

As part of our constant drive for improvement we are in the process of developing an ISO 9001 quality assurance system. Work is progressing well on policies and procedures, and we hope to be ready to apply for formal accreditation by the autumn, possibly sooner. “We are committed to offering a high quality translation service” says Mike Hunter, CEO. “The ISO standard was the only sensible one to apply for, due to its international recognition”, he added. Mike is a trained ISO auditor, and has previously introduced an ISO based quality system to a larger organisation. Quality assurance projects can easily fail if not properly “owned” by a company, having a CEO with such a commitment to quality should be significant here.

“I remember in the 1990s using an ISO accredited main car dealership in Derby who were always rude to customers” Mike said, “I sometimes wondered whether their customer care policy required them to be rude to customers 100% of the time, and they were then audited to ensure they met the standard…! Quality Assurance by itself doesn’t ensure a good deal for customers, but when you consider our track record of using well qualified and experienced translators and working well with blue chip clients over a long period of time, we are confident that the addition of formal ISO accreditation will add value for customers, and ensure we offer a continually improving service.”

The company is also working towards the 14001 environmental standard. “I already own a Honda hybrid car” says Mike, “and I think everyone has a responsibility to try and reduce their carbon footprint. Our business is already quite eco-friendly, but there are some simple things that we can do, such as minimising use of paper, using technology for meetings, rather than always travelling, and recycling as much as we can.”

We are looking forward to meeting other delegates at the internet conference today, looks like an excellent lineup of speakers. We are happy to share our experience of building a web presence, and if anyone wants to talk about any aspect of internationalising their website, including website translation, please either send us an e-mail, use our contact form, or contact us on Twitter we are @betterlanguages.

Susan Hallam was really helpful to the process of developing our new site, we commissioned her to write a website brief, and this was invaluable in getting the site we wanted and selecting the right web developers. Our web developers Attitude Design have a display at the conference, and there is a link to their site from our homepage.

A few facts about website translation by betterlanguages.com:

• largest single website order, 14 languages for a large multinational, around £26k of business on a single PO.
• Smallest website project, a few sentences in Simplified Chinese approximate value £50.
• Languages offered: all major languages. Translators and proofreaders are always professional translators, native of the target language, and of relevant specialism.
• Website translation can be very straightforward, especially if you have a good content management system. We can work directly in HTML.
• Having the draft site checked by the translation team is vital, its very easy to make errors when adding language content, or to miss bits of text. If there is a lot of hidden text on your site we need to know when starting work.
• We can work from a live site, but this can be tricky if it is constantly updated.
• Talk to us early in your project, and think through seriously what you need translated, broadly if you double the amount of content, you are doubling the cost. It is often better to start with a few well chosen pages and to build over time.

Have a look at the website translation section of our website, and read our King Charles Hotel case study.

An unusually closely fought election has seen no UK party with an overall majority, and as we speak discussions are starting between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative Party on whether they can reach a deal. My view all along has been that the Conservatives lacked credibility in a number of areas. I am skeptical that they can reach a deal with the Lib Dems, paving the way to a possible Lib Dem and Labour coalition. I think this could be a good result for the country, leading to political reform, and hopefully the best of both parties policies. The idea of the Conservatives going it alone with a minority Government, just doesn’t appeal, and I would expect there to be be another election before too long if that was the case. We will have to watch and see the result of the negotiations over the weekend.

We have just heard that we are finalists in the Nottingham Evening Post Business Awards 2010, in two categories, Small Business of the Year, and best use of IT and Communications. We are of course delighted to be finalists, and are pleased that the hard work of all the team has been recognised. It is pleasing that we have been able to grow through the recession, and we have also worked hard at IT and communications strengthening our infrastructure, and developing our website. We have just launched the betterlanguages.mobi site, and have refreshed the look and feel of the betterlanguages.com domain, as well as adding Romanian to the site for the first time.