“Our requests for translation quotes are always met quickly, and the work is always carried out to a high standard in a cost effective, timely manner. The staff are always helpful and efficient.”

Background

Blackburn Chemicals Ltd are a UK provider of chemical products who specialise in the manufacture and supply of foam control agents. With a workforce of around 100 and housed within a purpose built 10 acre manufacturing, research and development site in Blackburn Lancashire, they are a family firm who have been in business for over 40 years.

As a leader in their market, the company sells their products globally and exporting makes up around 75% of their business.

Our involvement

Part of the regulatory requirements when chemical products are sold dictates that safety information about the chemicals must be included. When Blackburn Chemicals sell one of their products, documentation (such as safety data sheets - SDS) that contains information about the hazards and safe use of the product, will be provided. Although not lengthy in terms of content - such data sheets are critical for safe handling of the products and also for industry compliance.

When Blackburn Chemicals sell a product to a global region whose native tongue is not English, the safety data information needs to be provided in the native language of that region. We provide the translations of the safety information for those various regions, and in doing so help Blackburn Chemicals export their products globally.

How we have helped

When we first started working with them, it was clear that we would be able to save them money by leveraging the existing translations. They had been exporting for a number of years and so over that time had built a large repository of translations. The occasional changes to datasheet that would result in a translation request were minimal so rather than charge for each individual document each time a translation request was needed, we were able to translate just for the new/changed text and based our costing on this small amount of text, rather than the entire document - something that the previous supplier had been doing.

To enable this firstly, we aligned the existing translations with their relevant source document. This work was carried out by a mother tongue linguists for each language we had translations for and the resulting aligned translation was then proof-read to ensure that the alignment work was correct. Once aligned we created a translation memory for each language and each document type that requires translation (i.e. French SDS, German TDS etc).

The result

Now whenever a new translation is needed we use the existing translation and leverage the translation from there. The new translation is then added to the correct translation memory. By doing this not only have we managed to save Blackburn Chemicals money on the export process, but we have also reduced the amount of time needed to be able to ship their products as the wait for the translated safety data has been dramatically reduced.

If you are a chemical who exports products or services and are looking for a new translation partner, we would be happy to hear from you. You can call our translation team on +44 (0)117 214 17605 or contact us via our webform.

We look forward to hearing from you soon.