CASE STUDY: Laying the Foundations: How We Built Multilingual Excellence for Home Forward
CLIENT: Home Forward, Housing Authority of Portland
SERVICE: Translation, Design and Testing
FORMAT: Website Containing Over 40 PDFs and Forms
SUBJECT MATTER: Corporate Training
THE CUSTOMER:
Home Forward creates a better community by providing housing stability through affordable housing development, housing choice expansion, services that support quality of life, and advocacy to improve local and national housing systems.
OUR CHALLENGE:
Home Forward approached us to translate their English website into Spanish and Vietnamese. The project was hosted on a beta testing site, SharePoint, and included not only the website content but also over 40 interactive PDFs and forms. This presented several unique challenges for our team:
• The original PDFs utilized fonts that did not support Vietnamese characters. Thus, finding visually similar fonts that maintained the integrity of the design while being compatible with the language was critical.
• The PDFs had interactive formatting on them (e.g., fields to be selected and filled out). Therefore, the files required meticulous proofreading and formatting to ensure they remained functional and visually consistent post-translation. Their interactive nature demanded an extra layer of precision.
• The website content was a mix of text with complex formatting such as bold, italics, and underlines. This needed to be preserved during the translation process. The content had to be copy-pasted into a bilingual table for translation using CAT tools and then carefully reintegrated into the website.
• With two target languages and a variety of content formats, ensuring linguistic and formatting consistency across all elements was vital. The work had to be handled with meticulous attention to detail to avoid introducing errors.
OUR SOLUTION:
Our Quality Assurance team, known for their precision and methodical approach, spearheaded the project from start to finish. Their expertise was crucial to addressing the complexities of the task and delivering a polished final product.
Handling the PDFs:
• We identified and replaced incompatible fonts with similar alternatives that supported Vietnamese characters, preserving the visual integrity of the documents.
• The interactive PDFs underwent a multi-stage process: an initial proofreading to ensure linguistic accuracy, careful formatting to maintain interactivity and design, and a final review to catch any overlooked issues.
Translating the Website:
• The website content was extracted and organized into bilingual tables to facilitate translation in our CAT tools. This process ensured linguistic consistency and allowed us to leverage translation memories for efficiency.
• QA tools like Xbench were employed for a comprehensive linguistic review, while Word and Google Docs’ spellcheck features provided an additional layer of quality control.
Reintegration and Final Checks:
• Once translated, the content was manually pasted into the webpage to prevent typographical errors.
• A final review was conducted to ensure all formatting was consistent with the original, and that no errors had been introduced during the reintegration process.
THE OUTCOME:
Throughout the project, the QA team’s meticulousness and systematic approach were key to overcoming the challenges posed by this complex, multi-format translation task. By prioritizing linguistic accuracy and formatting consistency at every stage, we ensured the client’s webpage and documents were not only flawlessly translated, but also functional and professional.
A second stage is still ahead, in which our QA team will conduct testing of the final live website. We honestly can’t wait!
