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.