Crazy situation: Customer responsible for translation?

[Geoff Hart]

Trina Pearce reports: <<My company has decided that we will not 
translate our docs. Our customers will be responsible.>>

Thanks for the tip... I'll be calling my stockbroker shortly. <g> A tad 
less facetiously, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. You haven't 
provided enough information for us to make an informed judgment on this 
situation, so a few general thoughts:

If the goal is to simply eliminate a necessary expense that nobody 
understands to be necessary, the company is simply being foolish. It 
will be seen for what it is: an attempt to shift the cost to the 
customer, and I can't imagine any customer accepting this graciously. 
If there are alternative programs available, many customers will adopt 
that solution. You might remind your managers that there are also clear 
legal concerns: although the translator is going to be the first line 
of responsibility for any errors, your company may also be dragged into 
any lawsuits.

If the customers are not already experienced in translation and 
localization, the possibilities for disaster are numerous: errors of 
interpretation, stupid errors (pasting the wrong text into the wrong 
place), failing to keep the documentation in synch with the English, 
linking to the wrong help topics or printed cross-references, and on 
and on and on. That's doubly true if they don't have quality control 
procedures at least as tight as your own and staff who will be 
dedicated to the translation process.

You'll also have to figure out how to handle copyright. The original 
English is copyrighted in your name, but copyright for the translation 
is probably in the hands of the translator if they're not doing this 
for you as a "work for hire". And if you insist that the translation be 
copyrighted in your name, I can imagine the customers laughing in your 
face. "What... you want us to do all the hard work and then hand it to 
you for nothing so you can sell it to someone else?"

On the other hand, if this is being seen as an opportunity to work with 
customers to provide documentation in the form they need, with the goal 
of giving them full control of a process that has thus far been 
frustrating and outside their control, this can be a very good thing 
indeed. If you also take the opportunity to benefit from their 
experience working with the documentation, and request feedback that 
will let you improve your documentation next time around, this is also 
a good thing. You'll have all kinds of issues with quality control, but 
these are manageable, and the payback from direct customer contact may 
justify the hassle.

<<So now, our doc team is faced with the task of determining what type 
of files to provide our customers with so they can have the 
documentation translated.>>

The only people who can tell you this are the customers. You're already 
placing a huge burden on them by making them responsible for 
translation, so you might at least try to ease that burden by working 
with them to find out their needs. At a minimum, they'll need your 
source texts and they'll need to work with the programmers to figure 
out how to effectively translate the software interface.

<<For several reasons, as you can imagine, our team doesn't want to 
hand over the source Frame files to the customer.>>

I can imagine several reasons, but no _good_ reasons. If you're really 
concerned about document security, send them a printout and make them 
retype everything: they'll hate you and take out mafia contracts on 
your senior management (not necessarily a bad thing), but at least your 
documents will be safe. If you're concerned about making a bad 
situation at least tolerable for the customer, send them whatever file 
format they request, including Frame. You control the original files, 
so why do you care what happens to copies of those files?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - --
Geoff Hart   ghart at videotron.ca
(try geoffhart at mac.com if you don't get a reply)
www.geoff-hart.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -