Clients » Case Studies » Tiffany & Co.
Background:
Tiffany has been the world's premier jeweler and one of America's first class houses of design since 1837. In order to further promote its jewelry products and continue to be an industry leader in 21st century, Tiffany is gradually constructing and developing its websites. The websites are available in English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, French, Japanese and other languages in order to serve customers around the globe. MTS assisted its overseas partners to successfully pass the Tiffany project's testing process and then undertook the translation of the website into Traditional Chinese.Challenges:
- Reference Materials
- Wording: Targeting the Taiwan market, the traditional Chinese translations must be very “local” instead of just simply duplicating the Simplified Chinese version word for word, although the latter was available for those involved to consult.
- Images: Translated Jewelry names were to be paired with their respective images on the website. In order to translate jewelry product names accurately, the translators had to first access the picture of a particular product by inputting the product code to look into the appearance of the jewelry, this took much more time than the usual process.
- Translation Style
- Faithfulness & Expressiveness: A vivid description had to be found for the jewelry products following consultation of the images and reference materials.
- Expressiveness & Elegance: Product profiles need to be produced in an elegant style without deviating from the facts.
- Constantly Updating
- The client has great expectations: The client continued to send us updated glossaries and instructions based on the partial translations we submitted, and asked us to resubmit the revised translations. On top of this, numerous identical phrases appeared frequently throughout the materials sent to us in rolling batches, making the whole updating process even more complicated.
- Our task was onerous: Each update affected the wording of our previous translations, as well as those that were undergoing translation and editing, dragging the finished and unfinished translations into a “vicious” cycle of endless editing.
Our Solutions:
- Translators: Given the scope of the project and the constant need for ongoing revisions, a few translators, editors and proofreaders with related backgrounds were selected to handle the two major document categories - Product Names and Product Profiles respectively. The proofreaders and editors had to, in principle, be familiar with all of the Tiffany documents so that each project could be carried out and delivered on time.
- The Use of QA tools: The involvement of QA tools such as X-bench and QA Distiller meant that the language consistency and style was maintained.
- Communicating Effectively with the Client: We communicated with the client’s Project Manager and Editor by phone and E-mail regarding the revisions made by them, discussing and learning from each other, making the Traditional Chinese version of the Tiffany’s website perfect!
Conclusion
The construction of Tiffany’s Traditional Chinese website commenced on March 2010 and is still ongoing. To date, we have completed approximately 150,000 words for the project and won the trust of our client for our professionalism, dedication as well as for our serious attitude towards the work.
Please refer to Tiffany’s website in Traditional Chinese: http://zh.tiffany.com/