Despite the challenging timelines and complex DTP, Ulatus successfully managed to help Huatai publish live equity reports in English with almost 65% reduced TAT and highest translation quality.
Huatai Securities - established in May 1991, is a leading integrated securities group in China with a substantial customer base and a highly collaborative full-service business model. Huatai Securities has the largest securities brokerage business in China and a leading e-Platform in the industry.
During recent years, Huatai Securities focused on providing customers with full life-cycle integrated financial services. They have built a full-service business model which is led by investment banking, underpinned by brokerage and wealth management, and supported by asset management as well as investment and trading.
Huatai was looking for a language partner to translate their Chinese equity/sector reports in English. These reports are live in nature, time-sensitive, and need to be published based on how the equity markets are functioning. Ulatus worked on a customized solution to meet Huatai's quick turnaround time requirements.
Huatai wanted to release the Chinese equity/sector reports in the US market to attract International investors towards Chinese markets. It was important to get the English reports ready as soon as the Chinese reports were published. We were provided live data by the equity analyst in Chinese, which had to be translated on a real-time basis along with dynamic updates.
Each equity report included around 50-60 charts and tables, which had to be translated into English. The key challenge, in the beginning, was that we received all non-editable files where we had no other option but to recreate them. There was no style guide provided, which made the formatting activity challenging. Getting all this together was a time-consuming activity, and we had to work out a solution considering the strict timelines we were working on.
One of the key challenges we faced during this project was the handling of large word count in a rushed TAT. The approximate word count of each report was around 25K to 30K characters, which included a lot of charts and tables. The client required us to drop our estimated turnaround time by around 65% and get all of this translated, edited, and checked, which was tough.
We managed to meet all client requirements through some of the key efforts mentioned below:
In order to meet the tight deadline and keeping the quality in mind, we worked on a custom solution where we had set up a team of linguists, checkers, editors, and DTP specialists based on past experience and the sample we had executed for Huatai's team. We used the approach of dividing the assignment into batches and delivering 50% in 2 days for Huatai's team to review. We got a positive response, and we continued accordingly. This worked as a win-win for both Huatai and us.
Due to the dynamic nature of the report, our team had to be available 24/7 to accommodate any live updates and incorporate them in the translated English report. Our team worked Saturdays and Sundays to ensure that all updates/changes were incorporated by the linguists and shared with Huatai on a real-time basis. Due to the long hours put in by the team, we were able to complete the large word count in the required time frame.
In any financial report, apart from the analysis, charts and tables are a critical and key component which depict the trend and the ongoing situation. So it was extremely important for us to translate, check and include all the financial and economic data in the right format.
We had put in our expert in-house DTP team on this assignment. The work was planned based on the initial charts and tables received. Also, some of them were not editable, so our team had to recreate them, which took time, but we managed to get it done. Another challenge we faced was that we didn't receive any style guide or glossary from Huatai initially for us to refer to during the translation process, so we had to rely on our experienced linguists to guide us through on this.
This project was important for us, considering that we were assisting our client Huatai in launching their reports in the US market, and for that, we had to have the best team working on it. We had one of our experienced Project Managers leading this assignment from day one.
Having an agile and automated workflow solution in place helped us move from initial discussions to kicking-off meetings, analyzing the original Chinese reports, reviewing the charts and tables, planning & coordination with the linguist and the in-house DTP team simultaneously were some key elements of execution. Seamlessly managing this technology and keeping the team engaged 24/7 proved to be the success factor in our timely delivery and customer delight.
