17 March 2022

How an Italian internet mail order retailer went global.

How an Italian internet mail order retailer went global.

The client: a global internet retailing partner for leading fashion and design brands. It has both monobrand and multi-brand stores. The client has worldwide offices and operations including the United States, Europe, Japan, and China, and delivers to more than 100 countries worldwide.

 

The challenges

The client’s localization requirements for their multi-brand stores, mono-brand stores and large number of brand partners had previously been handled by their in-house localization department. This team was responsible for all translation, proofreading, editing and in-context linguistic QA for both site content and newsletters.
However, with a multitude of brands falling under the client’s umbrella, the team was finding the whole process increasingly complex with approximately 40 sites to manage across 11 languages. Each brand also had very different localization needs depending on the international market penetration and how they strategically planned to expand their footprint. The client therefore sought to outsource language quality assurance requirements for all of their newsletters and associated banners, in order to allow their internal team to fully concentrate on the TEP process.
For this client, LQA had to occur directly in the final product and target language, after functional testing had been completed on the source language.

 

The solution

Alpha defined a team of mother tongue linguistic testers and a dedicated PM, all specializing in the fashion sector, to deliver the LQA services as a final sanity check to confirm that newsletters were ready for sending, and that associated banners were ready for display. The testers were tasked with checking and reporting the following:

  • Grammar mistakes
  • Typos (including brand name spellings)
  • Errors in monetary references and symbols (e.g. EUR/€ in US newsletter)
  • Layout issues (word-count must fit into relevant space, copy must be readable)
  • Mistakes in date, time and calendar formats
  • Inconsistencies between images and copy (e.g. if the content is about “coats” and images showed underwear, it must be reported)
  • Punctuation mistakes
  • Untranslated text
  • Consistency with translation provided by the client’s localization team, where made available.

 

The results

Alpha was able to deliver ultra-fast turnaround on quality assurance, meaning that the brand could meet its deadlines with confidence, knowing that all content delivered was accurate.
Alpha’s fastidious approach to LQA was behind the following successes:

  • Fast LQA cycle of newsletters and banners (from the standard 1-hour turnaround requested to peak times of 30 minutes turnaround) into 11 languages
  • Direct communication between Alpha reviewers and the client’s managed brands’ campaign developers resulted in time savings for team
  • Delivered LQA reviews for multi-brand online stores for mono-brand online stores (a total of 31 managed stores)
  • Separate translations and reviews completed by the client’s internal localisation team (the internal teams could concentrate only on TEP process of newsletters and banners while Alpha delivered the LQA service)
  • Cost-effective reviews