BluDanuBlog

BusinessWeek: Attracting International Clients to Your Website

BusinessWeek’s Karen Klein offers a few tips on working with international clients through your company’s website: be sensitive to cultural nuance; prepare, and prepare your customers, ahead of time to deal with shipping and customs issues; start by addressing other English-speaking markets, and when you’re ready to publish multilingual web content, back it up with multilingual sales and service staff. (Thanks to Laurel Delaney for the link!)

Many small businesses fall into exporting “accidentally” when orders from overseas customers start to trickle in through their website. Maximize your company’s potential by managing it as a global business from day one. Your business is already global, whether you know it yet or not!

More mixed messages from Czechs on Lisbon Treaty

Hardly an hour after the Czech Senate’s approval of the Lisbon Treaty for reform of the European Union institutions Wednesday, President Václav Klaus declared the treaty “dead” and refused to sign it, according to newspaper Mladá fronta Dnes. A group of the treaty’s defeated Senate opponents intend to ask for a review by the Constitutional Court. Klaus has long been known as a fierce critic of the treaty.

Danish firm bullish on wind

The latest annual World Market Update from Danish wind energy consultants BTM Consult ApS reports 42% growth in wind turbine capacity from 2007 to 2008, for a cumulative worldwide total of 122,000 MW. The report predicts 8.6% growth for the sector in 2009 despite the ongoing economic crisis, rising to an average of 15.7% annually through 2013. Wind power currently provides 1.3% of the world’s electricity. This figure is predicted to rise to 8% by 2018.

German company building “hybrid” power plant: electricity and hydrogen from wind

Germany’s Enertrag AG has begun work in Dauerthal, northeast of Berlin near the Polish border, on a “hybrid” wind power plant that will produce electricity and hydrogen. With a total generating capacity of 6 MW, the plant will supply the grid and use any excess power for hydrolysis to produce hydrogen for fuel and energy storage. The facility will also feature a combined heat and power plant fueled by biogas and hydrogen produced on-site. The plant is scheduled to come on-line in 2010.

Spanish PV market shows signs of recovery

The Spanish Ministry of Industry reports that approvals for new solar photovoltaic projects rose in Q2/2009 after having dropped sharply in the first quarter. The total capacity of newly approved projects is 130 MW, up from 88.7 MW for Q1.

The legislation governing Spain’s feed-in tariff system provides for adjustments based on quarterly approvals of rooftop and stand-alone installations. Since new approvals in the latter category amounted to 95 MW, slightly above the adjustment threshold of 94.5 MW, the new tariff for stand-alone PV installations will drop from 30.7 eurocents to 29.9 cents per kWh.

European Parliament: All new buildings from 2019 to consume net zero energy

The European Parliament has amended the 2002 Energy Performance of Buildings Directive to require that all buildings built after 2018 produce as much energy as they consume on-site, averaged over the course of the year, through enhanced efficiency and use of technology such as solar panels and heat pumps.

The amendment, which must be implemented in national law by member state legislatures, also calls for increased financial support for energy efficiency measures and sets standards to upgrade the energy performance of existing buildings.

$1bn Chinese manufacturing investment in Texas

Will Chinese workers soon be complaining that all the good manufacturing jobs are being outsourced to Texas? The state Comptroller’s office is reporting on a $1 billion pipe manufacturing facility to be built by a Chinese company on the Texas coast:

TPCO America Corp. (TPCO), a subsidiary of China-based Tianjin Pipe (Group) Corp., will build the plant near Gregory in San Patricio County. This will be the largest single manufacturing investment made by a Chinese company in the United States. The facility could create as many as 600 jobs and have an estimated $2.7 billion economic impact in 10 years.

The plant will produce pipe for the oil and gas industry and is scheduled to begin producing in two and a half years.

(And a shout-out goes to trade development goddess Jen Martinez for tweeting the story.)

Biomass tapped as top renewable energy contender in Czech Republic

A February 2009 U.S. Commercial Service Industry Sector Analysis (register to download) taps biomass as the renewable energy source with the greatest potential in the Czech Republic. The country currently gets 5.6% of its energy from renewable sources (official target for 2020: 13%), mostly hydroelectric with relatively little growth potential. Although solar photovoltaic saw strong expansion in 2008, the report does not consider solar a high-potential sector due to expiring subsidies. Wind is also experiencing strong growth, with a number of major projects in the pipeline.

German Energy Conservation Ordinance will boost distributed solar

Germany’s new Energy Conservation Ordinance (EnEV), which takes effect this October, permits energy generated on-site from renewable sources to be offset against a building’s energy consumption for code compliance purposes. The new regulation is expected to further boost interest in rooftop solar installations, already widespread thanks to Germany’s feed-in tariff system, especially in combination with new subsidies in the Renewable Energy Law. Critics maintain that the changes will promote electric heating systems and heat pumps at the expense of conservation, thus inadvertently leading to even higher electric power consumption in winter.
The new EnEV is based on comparison of a building’s energy consumption to a “reference building” with specified insulation values and equipment including a solar thermal hot-water system.
Although the website of the Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Affairs does have an English section, information on the new conservation standards is only available in German so far.

WTO predicts 9% drop in global trade this year

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reports that the World Trade Organization is predicting a decline of at least 9% in world trade for 2009, the most pessimistic forecast in the organization’s history. What happens next depends on political leaders’ ability to resist protectionist temptations.

German economy hurting badly

Edward Hugh at “A Fistful of Euros covers several recent forecasts of German GDP for 2009, predicting a contraction of anywhere from 4.3% to 7%. Ouch. ”It is also rather worrying that, with elections looming, Germany’s leaders seem to be in serious denial on all of this.”

CEE tigers

China and India get most of the headlines, but post-communist Europe has some tiger economies of its own.

Bloomberg reports that Slovakia’s GDP grew at an annual 9.4% in the second quarter with a projected 8.8% for the year.

Meanwhile Poland’s economy expanded at 6.7% in the second quarter, according to Dow-Jones Newswires.

Russia, of course, has become something of an oil sheikhdom in recent years, and even dowdy Belarus has benefited from imports of Russian oil and gas at below-market prices.

Hungary was the laggard with only 1.2% annualized growth in the second quarter, according to the Hungarian Central Statistical Office.

Back translation considered harmful

I recently read a book on international business that recommends the practice of “reverse translation” — after having a document translated, paying a second translator to translate the translation back into the original language to check accuracy. Although many translation companies do offer this “service,” (also known as back translation), most experienced translators agree that it does more harm than good overall. What back translation amounts to is a misguided attempt to get around the need for trust in a translator’s professional judgment, based on a deep-rooted misconception of the nature of language itself. The assumption is that the meaning of a text exists as a sort of platonic ideal, independent of its actual expression in specific words, that can be transferred back and forth from one language to another essentially unchanged. This is a false assumption that obscures the real issues involved in assessing translation quality.

Of course, if the client is personally proficient in both languages, he can judge for himself whether the translation is adequate. But even the greatest polyglots among us have this level of proficiency in only a handful of the world’s thousands of languages. For all the rest, assessing translation quality remains a surprisingly difficult challenge.

Back translation appears to restore the client’s ability to judge the original translation’s quality for himself, but this is an illusion.

The more superficial risk of this approach is that of false positives. A client who finds an error in a back translation may assume that it resulted from a mistake by the original translator, when in fact it could just as easily have been introduced during the back-translation process.

But the more important point is that back translation is utterly unsuited to identifying any but the crudest errors and infelicities, and doesn’t even catch all of those. One probably apocryphal example is an article about spectator sports that was reportedly translated into Spanish with the word “fan,” in the sense of someone who roots for a team, rendered as “ventilador” — a mechanical fan for blowing air. A client relying solely on back translation for quality control would be none the wiser.

An advocate of back translation might object that the back-translator would surely have an opportunity to point out the error in a comment. I agree, but would add that it’s really only the comments, and not the back translation itself, that provide any genuine value in assessing the quality of the original translation.

Pure semantic errors of the “ventilador” type are actually rare in the work of all but the most inexperienced translators. They occur mainly when a translator gets out of his technical depth and lacks the time or resources to research terminology in a document’s field. Errors of this type may or may not lend themselves to reproduction in the original source language in a back translation.

But word-for-word or term-for-term mapping between one language and another is not really the issue in professional-level translation quality assessment. The essence of an experienced translator’s skill is in creating a document that effectively performs its function — to instruct, inform, persuade, etc. — in the target-language environment. Done with skill, translation is a creative act, not a mechanical process. It’s not at all uncommon for an experienced translator to put more care into a document than the original author. (One translator I know actually uses the slogan “Translations better than the original.”)

The problem with most of the many, many poor translations I’ve seen in my 14 years in the business is that they’re only “half-translated.” The target-language words are there, but the rhetorical conventions and discursive structures are still those of the source language. The reader finds these documents awkward, irritating, difficult to understand, and unpleasant (or unintentionally funny) to read because they don’t conform to the patterns of how ideas are expressed and texts composed in the target language. These are subjective factors, but they’re very real and always present.

And they’re all but impossible to capture in back translation. If there really are serious problems with the original translation, the back-translator finds himself in the peculiar situation of being expected to produce a “bad” translation — the better he exercises his skill in creating an effective target-language document, the more he undermines the purpose of the job he was asked to do. In fact, since the problem with the translated document is that it still retains the “sound and feel” of the original language, producing a back translation that reads smoothly is actually relatively easy. To truly reproduce the effect of an awkward, “foreign-sounding” translation in a back translation would be as difficult as it is pointless.

It would be much quicker and easier (read cheaper) for a reviewer to skip the back translation and simply tell the client that the translation is awkward and sounds wrong in the target language. And/or for the client to pay another skilled professional to revise and polish the translation, not produce a degraded sibling of the original source document. This sort of peer review process has always been a standard part of Blue Danube’s services.

Back translation gives the client an illusion of being able to judge quality for himself, but in fact it reveals at least as much about the abilities of the back-translator as it does about the original translation. Replacing back translation with a peer review process uncovers the awkward fact that the client cannot avoid depending on the professional judgment of at least one translator somewhere in the revision chain.

People don’t generally seem reluctant to trust the judgment of doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc. But translating is the Rodney Dangerfield of professions — translators “don’t get no respect.” Of course translators don’t necessarily have the same level of training or go through the rigorous certification processes of other professions, and unfortunately it’s all too easy for unqualified people with some limited bilingual background to hang out their shingles. So knowing whose judgment to rely on is a difficult problem in its own right. But the illusory confidence provided by the practice of back translation is harmful to both the profession and the client’s own interests.