During this three-part blog series, I will examine the mentality behind forced English learning in corporations and how it affects employee morale and productivity. This is a case study on Rakuten, the largest online marketplace in Japan, and its CEO’s decision to enforce a policy of English-only communication on all 7,100 of his Japanese employees.
By Scott Bass and Molly Ancello
In today’s global business environment, ensuring that an organization’s brand identity, content and message are all transmitted accurately in every language is imperative. Those that create the content and messages have greater responsibility to understand how their message will translate into other languages and markets. Content Rules lays out the pros, cons and timeline of when to translate, localize or transcreate; and we have one addition to this great analysis.
“One of the most important strategy guidelines for Global Content Creators is determining what and where you are going to translate, localize, or transcreate content.” Strategy Guidelines for Global Content Creators (Oct.2012) by Content Rules: The global content experts
MA: Firstly, why invest in new technology?
SB: We pride ourselves in having the best technology available in the industry, which allows us to provide faster, more precise service to customers. Like most 21st-century industries, computer software and hardware technology is constantly improving. In our case, we have seen improvements in machine translation, project management, and database software. Having the best tools on hand makes everyone at our company more efficient and able to better assist more customers.
Translation memory technology is designed to assist the translators in ‘remembering’ what they, or translators before them, translated and how they translated it.
