Our venture into the automotive industry
By Jack Brian Robinson
Introduction
One of our most exciting projects was working with the company Chipex, who specialize in car touch-up paint. Chipex was launched in 2009 with the aim to enable people to repair paint damage on their vehicles at home. They have helped thousands of people with their easy-to-use products. The company was established in the UK and has recently begun expanding to foreign markets, such as Italy, Sweden, France, Spain, and Germany.
BestTranslators.online collaborated with Chipex last year, conducting a full review of their website and translating their various blog posts. Our team of dedicated translators all banded together to help Chipex with this task that was fundamental in helping expand their business to a wider audience.
I spoke with some of the translators who were responsible for this in order to find out what they did, the challenges they faced, and how this experience helped them develop as professionals.
First up was Mathieu, one of our French translators.
Hey Mathieu, I want to hear about your work with Chipex. What were your specific responsibilities?
Hi Jack! I was responsible for two different projects: the first was translating some of Chipex’s blog articles from English to French (covering paint touch-ups, car insurance/maintenance, etc), and the second was proofreading the French version of their website.
Great. And would you mind telling me about some of the challenges you faced during these projects?
Sure. The biggest challenge I faced was in the preparation. I had to learn about the whole process of touching-up car paint (something I knew practically nothing about) in order to best translate the very specific and technical vocabulary into French.
Sometimes there is no established translation for a specific thing. A word/phrase for something in English might not exist in French.
An example of this which I encountered was in the translating of “Blending Solution” – this was almost always translated as “solution de mélange” from the various sources I found, but this did not seem right to me.
After researching the product, I concluded that it wasn’t a sufficient description of what the product was designed for.
After some thorough research I settled on “solution d’uniformisation” which I found was a much more appropriate translation and encapsulated fully what the product was.
Thank you, Matthieu!
I found Matthieu’s account of his experience with this tricky translation very relatable. People who have read some of my previous articles will know that Italian is my second language and I’m responsible for some of the Italian to English translations (being a native English speaker myself). I’ve encountered this issue on a number of occasions: words that exist in one language, but not in another.
Italians tend to adopt a lot of English words, so this is generally a moot point when translating from Eng>Ita – but, when looking at translating from Ita>Eng, it can often lead to some serious head scratching. As a translator you want to preserve as much as possible the meaning behind the original text, but sometimes (as we’ve seen in Matthieu’s case) you need to get creative.
Sandra, who was responsible for the same tasks as Matthieu (but for German) expressed this sentiment perfectly:
When translating I always try to keep the text as natural sounding as possible, all without altering the text’s original meaning. – Sandra Alles
Next, I wanted to reach out to the head of our team and fellow translator, Emanuele, in order to find out what his involvement in the Chipex project was.
Hey Emanuele! Mind if I ask you a few questions about Chipex? What was it that you worked on?
Hey Jack! I worked on translating instructions, website interface, website revision (before launch) and blog posts. I also worked alongside one of the Managers and the Owner to help coordinate the launch in the various different languages.
I see. Would you mind telling me about any challenges that you faced?
The Chipex project was pretty technical and there were a lot of words relating to car paint and the automotive industry as a whole. Luckily, I already had experience in this field, due to having previously done work for an automotive website. As often happens, certain terms didn’t exist in both languages, such as “road rush” – therefore I had to find something similar in Italian that conveyed the same meaning.
And how did this experience inform your work going forward?
Personally speaking, I learned a lot about car paint and how I can better maintain my own vehicle in this regard. Professionally, I learned a lot through collaborating with the website designer. It was a great learning experience.
Do you have any personal thoughts to add?
It’s inspiring to be able to work on such innovative products as those at Chipex. The company is now expanding to the US market, and I feel very proud to have played a role in helping them achieve success.
How exciting to hear about Chipex’s success following our collaboration. Thank you, Em! Here at BestTranslators.Online, we often work on some very important projects (such as this one). As a translator it’s hard to not feel the weight of this pressure. As a team we’re able to work together, pull through and tackle various projects, big and small. We always strive to provide our clients with translations and proofreads of the highest quality.
We take pride in what we do as our clients’ success is just as important as our own. We also love what we do. Chipex (as you’ve seen) presented many challenges for our team, but it was a rewarding experience that helped us to cement new professional relationships, develop new skills, and to prove that we’re able to coordinate and complete large projects efficiently, quickly and, most importantly, to a high degree of quality.
Who knows, perhaps your project will be our next Chipex success story? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section down below. Thank you.