Publishing case studies

Company Background

Saatchi Gallery is a London gallery for contemporary art which opened in 1985 to display Charles Saatchi’s collection to the public. The gallery has been a major influence on art in Britain since its opening and has provided a springboard to launch the careers of many unknown artists. In 2006, the Saatchi Gallery website began an open-access section called Your Gallery, where artists can upload up to 8 works of art and a biography onto their own page. Over 20,000 artists have done so, and the site receives an estimated 40,000,000 hits a day. In 2007 a new feature was added to the website, "Museums around the World", where over 3,300 museums can now be visited online, showing highlights of their collections, exhibitions and other relevant information.

Requirements

Today Translations was appointed to undertake the colossal task of translating and localising 800,000+ words of the Gallery website (http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk) into Chinese Mandarin. The Gallery website features paintings and biographies of numerous international artists, and the main translation challenge was to retain, in the Chinese version, the vivid, eloquent and elegant prose of the original. The translation of the website was to be processed and tested in HTML format prior to delivery.
 

Solution

Our company assembled a team of native-speaker Chinese Mandarin translators and localisers with in-depth knowledge of art and substantial experience in creative writing. Rather than a word-for-word translation, our linguists conveyed the grace and inspiration of the source text by exploring concepts that would be suitable and meaningful to a Chinese audience.

Translation-memory technology was employed throughout the project, ensuring cost-effectiveness to the customer, consistent terminology, and efficient handling of HTML files. In addition, interactive proofreading was incorporated during the various stages of the English to Chinese translation to guarantee the end product was grammatically accurate and semantically perfect.

All HTML files were tested internally before being delivered to the client to ensure all webpage elements were being displayed correctly in Chinese Mandarin and to guarantee there would be no text overflows.