The Challenge
Our client was a leading U.S. home-warranty company, and we were assigned a Vietnamese localization project for one of their brochures. Although it seemed like a straightforward translation and desktop publishing project, we had to face and solve three problems:
- Many of the terms used in the USA home-warranty industry had no
counterpart in Vietnamese. Home-warranty companies simply did not exist in
Vietnam.
- During the DTP conversion process some Vietnamese font files were corrupted,
but non-native Vietnamese readers would not be able to tell the difference
- Last but not least, we were facing the issue caused by the existence of
several dialects within the Vietnamese region. Some terminologies in the
northern dialects might sound biased and inappropriate to persons fluent in
their southern counterparts.
The Solution
We chose translators based in the USA, and held in-depth discussions in order to agree on terms that could be accepted by Vietnamese communities in the USA. We invited the translators to our office so they could work with our in-house DTP team and ensure there would be no file corruptions during the DTP process. To avoid conflicts of style, we chose editors and translators from different regions of both North and South Vietnam. By working closely with the client throughout the process, we were able to provide a print-ready Vietnamese brochure that met or even exceeded the expectation. We are grateful that our USA office is located in Los Angeles, where 10 different Asian communities with enough linguistic and cultural resources can be reached within a 30-mile radius.
