Innovative Publishing Company Seeks Unique Translation Services

Overview: About Niche Pressworks

Niche Pressworks helps professional coaches, speakers, and business owners grow their businesses and make a bigger impact through strategic book publishing.

Four out of five industry leaders author the “wrong” book, one that fails to reach its targeted audience. Niche Pressworks takes the guesswork out of the publishing process, using a proprietary system to target one of nine strategies designed to elevate a company’s brand and create a marketing asset that retains value.

Problem: Quality Assurance for an Outside-the-Box Translation Project

With over 200 books published in 9 languages, the publisher was experienced with translation, insofar as the requisite process and timeline. This client project called for more than that, however – content written in English for a general audience needed translation into Spanish for an adolescent audience.

Simultaneously translating and adapting content to appeal to a completely different audience opens the door to ambiguity and confusion, or even complete mistranslation – idioms and turns-of-phrase, colloquialisms, slang, jokes, and the like can easily get “lost in translation.” For any such “niche,” one-of-a-kind translation, quality means the difference between an engaged readership and an indifferent – even alienated – audience. Tone and style, context, even grammar and word choice all come into play when adapting content to a different audience, especially when generational differences are in play.

Solution: Assign an Experienced Translator-Editor Team

To combat the known variables, we assigned both a translator and editor to the project to ensure the translated book remained true to the author’s intention. In the language services sector, “editors” are translators with fluency in both source and output languages; and, like book editors, they are trained to check for grammar and proper meaning, refining and even rewriting as needed to maintain the content’s continuity and accuracy, but especially its appeal.

The client’s in-house editor worked closely with both the author and the Rapport International translator-editor team, asking questions and providing feedback and edits, all of which were incorporated into the process. In the end, although some of the content was rewritten, deviating from the literal translation of the original source material, Niche Pressworks and its author-client approved all edits and changes were accepted and implemented. In the process, a print-ready version of a new book was created, within projected delivery and cost schedules.

Results: High-Quality, Print-Ready Spanish Publication Finds a New Audience

Using a tried and tested process minimizes the back-and-forth among invested parties of any translation project. At least five stakeholders – Rapport International’s translator-editor team, Niche Pressworks and its editor, the author – had their concerns and requirements addressed, while keeping the project on-time and on-budget, producing a print-ready book worthy of the Niche Pressworks stamp of approval.