Are you in the retail or fashion industry?

Read further and learn more about translation workflow when working with Chinese translators.

In this blog post, we’re going to share with you how we helped one of our previous clients who needed product catalog Chinese translation.

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We received an inquiry from a high-end tailor-made fashion brand, Shanghai Tang. The brand needed help regarding a 100-page product catalog, showcasing the clothing, accessories, and jewelry.

We browsed the catalog and found out there are similar or the same descriptions in the product lines. Most of them had a noticeable high repetition.

For us, we have rules when it comes to repetitions. When we spot repetitions, we only charge 10% of the standard price. Other agencies and companies can go as high up to 30%. Our client wanted to take advantage of this lowest rate on the repetitions.

Seamless workflow of product catalog Chinese translation

Chinese Fashion Translation with Fast Delivery Time

The client shared a simple glossary with us, which is very helpful. During the translation process, we created translation memory and terminology base specifically for them.

That process helped us run QA against the glossary provided. We made sure that the Chinese translation was consistent and matched the provided glossary.

The layout was important for the client. We kept both the English and Chinese layouts in a bilingual form. Thus, the client was able to quickly review our translation from the English source side by side.

We imported the catalog into our CAT tool for analysis and found it contained much repetition. We shared that word count report with the client and proposed only 10% for the repetitions detected by the CAT tool.

Our client was pleased with a massive discount on prices and appreciated our efforts to save their budget on translation service. So, they ordered the translation service from us.

Taking care of the formatting in Chinese product catalogs

Though the client had InDesign source file (we saw the meta information in PDF file property), they preferred to send us a Word format catalog. We assumed this was helpful for the reviewing process.

The emphasized the importance of formatting. So, we made sure we followed the requirements.

Before translation, we processed the catalog into bilingual form. Next, we hid the English source language manually throughout the catalog.

In this way, we made sure that the English source will be protected from any tampering during translation. Then the unhidden English texts will be automatically replaced by Chinese translation after the translation was done in CAT tools.

Chinese translation and QA check

We imported the processed catalog, which was bilingual-ready into the CAT tool for further translation and proofreading.

After translation and proofreading were done, we ran a full-length QA check for the translation to spot the errors.

When all the errors were corrected, we exported the final translation.

Then we unhide all the contents. Voila! We got a bilingual catalog! After proper checking and adjustment, the catalog was all set and ready for client review.

Professional Chinese fashion translator on board

The client was a returning customer who was very satisfied with our fashion translator, Mr. Eric Chen. So, they appointed Eric to be the sole translator for the catalog, even though Eric might take up 14 days to complete the whole translation.

While we took care of the formatting, Eric was able to focus on the translation only.

Usually, with generic content, translators can work at a moderate speed of 2,000 to 3,000 source words, depending on the complexity of the words and phrases. However, fashion translations would require both excellent translation skills and a bit of transcreation as well.

Creative work requires extended time.

Eventually, It took Eric ten (10) days to complete the whole translation, at a translation speed of 1,500 words per day.

The result of our fashion translation project and client’s feedback

The client was happy with both translation quality, earlier delivery time and affordable cost of the entire project. To summarize, here are the details:

• Language pair: English to Simplified Chinese
• Word count: 26221 words
• Repetition: 10453 words
• Translators: 1
• Lead time: 10 working days

How about you? Do you need help in fashion translation? What do you think of our translation workflow? Let us know if you need assistance, our AZ-Loc fashion translators and project managers are happy to help you get started.