Some Success Stories
Listening to your Japanese user’s voice
A Silicon Valley medical instrumentation company (Company M) is just entering the Japanese market. They have a distributor who sells to specialized clinics who in turn use the equipment to perform a unique new kind of treatment. Working through a distributor, it is hard for Company M to evaluate the performance of the individual clinics and even harder to determine if end-users are satisfied with the treatment.
Working closely with the client, we found that a website in Japan, called “Kuchi-Komi” (word of mouth) is used by patients to discuss treatments for various medical and cosmetic conditions. We identified a Kuchi Komi thread dealing with Company M’s product and its efficacy. The thread was quite extensive and it would have cost many thousands of dollars for a blanket translation of it all. Here we offered the client “value-added translation.” We agreed on a limited budget and educated the translator about the client’s objectives, which were to gain understanding of the patients' experience and whatever comments they had on the various clinics. The translator used his initiative to pick out the high-value content for translation into English and skip over repetitive or irrelevant material. Within the limited budget, Company M was able to hear their client’s voice and learn how to improve their product and strengthen some of the weaker clinics. This inside knowledge also gave them leverage in pressuring their Japanese distributor to perform better.
Saving money when filing patents in Japan
A high tech firm (Company K) files dozens of patents in Japan each year. Their procedure had been to have the patent law firm in Japan handle the whole project, but they eventually realized that the cost of translation was much higher than what they were paying to have us translate other technical documents for them. They learned that this was not only due to the strength of the Yen (at that time 80Y to the dollar), but also due to the additional markup the Japanese law firm added to the cost of translation (even though it was done by an outside contractor in Japan.) We explained to the client that the team we use for into-Japanese patent translation are native speakers of Japanese, are highly technical (in several cases, PhDs), and have extensive experience with the unique work of drafting patents in a form that satisfies Japan’s rules on terminology and format.
The Japanese law firm initially resisted Company K’s plan to use the JTT team, but after we did a no-cost sample which exceeded the Japan side’s standards, they acquiesced. Since then we have worked closely and smoothly with the Japanese law firm while saving Company K a lot of money.
Cutting the cost of litigation support
During the discovery phase of an international law suit, various documents are requested from the Japanese side. But they have no motivation to pick exactly those documents that help the US side build its case, so boxes and boxes of Japanese documents are delivered, most of which are irrelevant. In such cases, blanket translation of these can be exorbitantly expensive, so we work closely with law firms to implement a system that achieves the goal of identifying and translating the critical documents while spending as little cost as possible to eliminate the chaff.
In the case of an international law firm (Company W), we put together a team of bilingual document reviewers and, working with the attorneys, trained them on the gist of the case, the key words, concepts, and culprits. Working onsite, they sorted out relevant documents and a team of translators working next to them did summaries of those documents. Finally, when the attorneys had reviewed those and isolated the key documents for use in court, we made complete translations of those, double-checked them, and provided translation certificates. After months of work, the case went to court and our side won, to the tune of a $400 million judgment.