The Translation Challenge
Royal Mail, in partnership with ParcelForce, faced a legal requirement to provide comprehensive guides on their services and pricing in Welsh for use in Wales, ensuring parity with their English versions.
The challenge arose from the Royal Mail’s previous translation agency’s approach to updating these guides, a fragmented and disjointed method which led to discrepancies between the English and Welsh versions as each was translated separately rather than as a suite of literature in a defined process.
As the guides were often more than a hundred pages long, ensuring accuracy and consistency across languages became increasingly complex, especially when only about 10% of the content was updated between each issue, leading to uncertainty about the fidelity of the Welsh guides to their English counterparts.
The Bubbles Approach
Bubbles implemented a multifaceted approach to address these challenges and streamline the translation process for Royal Mail, working collaboratively with their design and print company Linney:
- Comprehensive Translation from Scratch: For each new update, Bubbles translated the latest English versions of the guides into Welsh from scratch, ensuring a fresh and accurate translation of the updated content.
- Review and Integration of Existing Welsh Content: Alongside translating new updates, Bubbles reviewed and integrated the existing 90% of Welsh content from previous issues, correcting numerous errors found in the older documents to enhance overall accuracy.
- Implementation of Translation Memory: Bubbles introduced translation memory technology to manage the Welsh guides more efficiently. This tool stores the Welsh translation of every sentence from the English versions, enabling the reuse of existing translations for recurring content. This approach ensures consistency across versions and minimises costs by avoiding the retranslation of unchanged content.
- Quality Assurance and Error Correction: The process included a thorough review of previous Welsh translations to identify and correct errors, thereby improving the quality and reliability of the Welsh guides.
- Synchronised Updates: By translating the updated 10% of content and reviewing the remaining 90%, Bubbles ensured that each Welsh guide matched its corresponding English version precisely, fulfilling Royal Mail’s legal obligations and maintaining consistency across languages.
Project Outcomes, Results & Success
Through Bubbles’ strategic approach, Royal Mail achieved exact alignment between the English and Welsh versions of their comprehensive service guides. The use of translation memory technology played a pivotal role in streamlining the update process, ensuring cost efficiency, and maintaining consistency across languages.
This approach not only rectified the piecemeal update issue but also significantly enhanced the accuracy of the Welsh guides.
By correcting errors in previous translations and ensuring a faithful reflection of the updated English content, Bubbles helped Royal Mail fulfil its legal obligations and provide high-quality, reliable information to Welsh-speaking customers, reinforcing Royal Mail’s commitment to inclusivity and precision in customer communication.
