Ulatus worked as a team with Afcons and their web designing partner to provide a localized website in Japanese, African French, & Latin American Spanish, helping Afcons make a marketing outreach to their clients in these regions.
Afcons is a part of the $7bn Shapoorji Pallonji Group, which has a legacy of over 150 years. A $1.25bn company in itself, Afcons has a portfolio of extremely challenging and complex projects worldwide. It is one of India's fastest-growing infrastructure companies and has a $ 300mn (approx) strategic equipment fleet. Afcons has projects in over 22 countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Globally, Afcons is ranked 7th in Marine and Port facilities and 13th in the Bridges sector as per the latest Engineering News-Record (ENR), USA survey. It is also among the top 150 international and global contractors. It is a leader in the Marine, LNG, and Metro Rail segment in India. Afcons is the first infrastructure company globally to win the Most Innovative Knowledge Enterprise (MIKE) Award at the Global, Asia Pacific, and India levels in 2018, 2019, and 2020, having won its predecessor the Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise (MAKE) Award in 2016 and 2017.
Afcons was in the process of building a new website in EN from scratch and had appointed a web designing company for the project. At the same time, they approached us to localize their brand new website into three languages - Japanese, African French, and Latin American Spanish.
Afcons was in the process of developing their new EN website, and the project was handled by a web designer. The website wireframes were design-heavy, making the localization process a bit challenging. The requirements included Website Localization, SEO, Video Subtitling, Captioning, and OST Translation & Integration in three languages, Japanese, African French, and Latin American Spanish. It meant putting a humoungous effort in bringing together expertise in SEO, translation, and audio-video localization.
Since a web designer was involved in the project, efficient communication, planning, and coordination was essential. The critical part was to maintain seamless synchronization among Afcons, the web designer, and Ulatus in a tripartite setup. It was imperative to ensure there were no information gaps or requirement misunderstandings and the client was always updated on cost fluctuations from our end due to scope creeps.
The project was design-heavy and we had a lot of audio-video localization requirements. We had to plan and bring our best team forward for closed captioning, subtitling, OST, voiceovers, video editing, and embedding the requirements into multiple languages. Since the EN website was being developed simultaneously, we were getting many new video clips that had to be localized and integrated into the multi-lingual websites, which was a complicated process. In addition, we had to constantly translate all the new COVID-19 updates that were added by the client on the website.
While working on the audio-video localization projects from EN to global languages, we had to focus on giving the native local touch to the translated information. In this project, we were translating content, images, videos into three different languages with entirely different dialects, so we had to keep the native audience in mind and focus on maintaining tone and style.
We, at Ulatus, provided Website Localization, SEO, Video Subtitling, Captioning, and OST Translation & Integration in three languages, Japanese, African French, and Latin American Spanish.
We managed to meet all client requirements through some of the key efforts mentioned below:
We planned this project in a phased manner. First, we completed translation and localization in Japanese, then in African French, and finally, in Latin American Spanish. Since there were many moving parts like Website Translation + Key Word Translation & Optimization + Video Subtitling and OST Translation & Integration, we started picking the right set of linguists with expertise in the infrastructure domain and deployed our AV team who are experts in handling multimedia localization.
Due to the amount of multimedia work involved in this project, our team was constantly getting requests from the web designer for including new video clips over and above the ones we received in the original set when we started the project. Also, the video subtitling & OST integration post-translation had to be carried out on all the videos for the respective languages. Our team integrated the srt files by carefully reviewing the videos and placing the subtitles/ost in the correct video timeline. It had to be planned with precision to ensure that nothing was missed and the quality was top-notch.
At Ulatus, we focus on quality as it is a very critical component of our localization workflow. We had to deploy a double layer of the review process in this project due to content localization and audio-video localization. We provided Translation, Editing & Proofreading, and a Native Reviewer check before finalizing the website content. The Native Reviewer also thoroughly reviewed the multimedia content viz. the video subtitles and OST to ensure everything was in tandem with the local adaptation point of view, and the tone and style of the respective locales were consistent.
The project took time due to back and forth between multiple parties involved however the Project Manager who worked on this project was one of the key contributors to the success who was like a glue and managed to stick everything together.
