Banking website localisation

When is a banking website not about banking?

Our client is a high profile company in the banking sector.

To underline their ongoing commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) – one of the reasons we’re proud to work with them – they wanted to produce a website which would act as an online report on their sustainability and community investment activities.

This website would need to be translated into seven different languages.

What challenge did we take on?

Our client asked us to localise their English website into Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese for Taiwan, Traditional Chinese for Hong Kong, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean and Thai.

This would involve the translation of 100,000 words into each of the seven required languages, subtitling of interviews embedded on the site, Flash and image localisation, engineering and testing.

Arguably the biggest challenge was to translate content which relates to a bank while focussing on sustainability and the community, two subjects which contain very different concepts and terminology to those used in the financial sector.

How did we select the right team?

Our first step was to choose translators and editors who had the expertise to work on both banking and CSR content.

Luckily, one of the ways in which we are a little unusual as a Language Service Provider is the way we categorise our linguists according to industry sector specialism as well as functional specialism.

Because we had already worked with this client for several years by this point, a quick search on our vendor database (cross-referencing banking sector with CSR and client name) brought up a selection of linguists who have performed well on CSR projects for this client in the past.

What did we do?

Localisation, engineering and testing tasks are some of our core activities. They were accomplished quickly and easily.

The team we selected were well aware of the requirements specific to Asian languages. This includes the need to manually set Japanese and Thai linebreaks in Flash, for example.

Our linguists translated directly into the HTML files using Trados.

What was the outcome?

Our client’s enviable reputation for CSR has now spread across Asia.

The website communicates in clear language many concepts that are not as well known in Asia as they are in Europe.

We share our client’s hope that these translated websites will inspire Asian customers of other multinational corporations to seek out brands that are giving something back to the communities in which they operate.