Oh! Toys is an online toy store specializing in unique, well-crafted European and Japanese toys that entertain and stimulate a child’s creativity and imagination. The collection includes building blocks, marble runs, wooden toys, puzzles, construction toys and more. They seek “out-of-the-mainstream” toys that stimulate a child’s natural desire to explore, invent and think.
Oh! Toys was seeing a dramatic increase in sales for a building-block marble run toy on the website called Cuboro. They researched the source of the increase and it led back to a Japanese website that gave a highly positive and thorough review of the product.
They called Rapport International seeking a translation of the Japanese website so they could understand what it said about their product. The initial request resulted in a price quote of $2000, which was well out of budget for this type of project.
To follow-up on the quote, Rapport International consulted with Oh! Toys to develop a more cost-effective plan for them to get the results they wanted. Once we fully understood what they wanted, we suggested they narrow-down the amount of text to focus only on the portions referring to the Cuboro toy then run that text through a free machine translation tool like Google Translate to get a gist translation.
Machine translation tools are not appropriate when you need high-quality, accurate translations, but in a case like this where they merely need a general understanding of the material, machine translation may be good enough.
After running the smaller amount of text through Google Translate Oh! Toys came back to Rapport International. One section of the translation they got back said that the toy “stimulates the ass part of the brain.”
The client knew this didn’t make sense, and the rest of the translation stimulated his curiosity, so they asked Rapport International to translate a more focused section of the website. The quote for the new project came in at $200, a significant savings over the initial project.
The accurate translation for the section in question was “3D block puzzles stimulate an area of the brain called the precuneus, which is responsible for understanding spatial structures.”
Oh! Toys used this quote and the rest of the professionally translated information to highlight the benefits of the Cuboro toys on their website which increased sales both domestically and in Japan.
“My business spiked because of a Japanese website. I wanted to find out what it said so I called Rapport International. The project I presented to them priced out in the thousands of dollars. After their free consultation on what to translate the project became a couple hundred dollars. I appreciated their honesty.”
Read more about the cost of translation in our blog "How Much Does Translation & Interpretation Cost?"
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