Why customer service translation is harder than you think: in conversation with Marina Sánchez Torrón

Customer service translation can be a minefield — but it doesn’t need to be a problem

I was never that keen on translation theory at university. Being a more speaking-oriented language learner, I often found the classes to be long and tedious, and one of the things I found the most frustrating is that the texts we were often given to translate were so far removed from any translation task most of the people in the class would ever encounter in their careers — a lot of complicated literature or deliberately difficult news articles that tried to squeeze in as much complex grammar as possible to make you trip up.

So when I came into contact with Unbabel for the first time, I thought that the work editors do seemed more representative. Here was what the bulk of translation out there in the real world ought to be — short tasks with usable glossaries and nothing designed to trip you up. The fact is, though, that this doesn’t mean that translating customer service emails is easy — in fact, they often present unique challenges. To get to grips with this, I decided to speak to Marina Sánchez Torrón, our Senior Natural Language Analyst and linguist extraordinaire, and here’s what we came up with.

Source quality challenges

Marina: Unlike many standard texts, sometimes the source in customer service emails can present real challenges. It’s common to find different linguistic varieties and texts written by non-native speakers who are often under time pressure, resulting in non-standard forms or lapses in punctuation. This can be challenging to editors as the finished product still needs to be perfect when the customer receives it.

Ben: This is indeed a tough one — so much so that we actually produce language guides for our clients so they can produce emails that are a good fit with customers in every language.

However, we also ask a lot of our editors, and tend to find that they are exceptionally good at creating a fantastic end product, often from source language that can be lacking, but there are still some things that prove challenging time and time again. Often, the problem isn’t that the text can’t be understood (in fact, if this is the case then the task should be skipped and reported), but that there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to customer service translation.

Let’s say you’ve been asked to translate a newspaper article into German. The article itself will have gone through a rigorous editing process, been checked by both an editor and proofreader for corrections and flow, and will have been published. Now, let’s compare that with a customer service email that has never been seen by anyone else before and isn’t subject to the same process. The email is a little complex although perfectly understandable, but has very long sentences and suffers from a lack of punctuation.

Now, before you even get to working on the translation, you’ve got to break up the source into manageable chunks and think about how best it would fit into German, which can be quite tough as these long sentences can confuse the machine translation and the use of commas and word order is particularly important for German. There’s a whole other layer of thinking you’ve got to do there just because this is a customer service email.

Context

Ben: With customer service emails, it’s usually not possible to see all of the context you’d ideally like to complete the task. Although they are, in essence, just one element of a long conversation, because they function as individual parts of the conversation you’ll only have a small chunk to work on at any one time. This means that you could end up with very little to go on, making your job even harder.

Marina: Due to the fact that some information may well have been included in a previous part of the email chain, you often have to search online for information. Let’s say you’re translating into French, or another language which has grammatical features that require you to know the gender of the person you’re speaking to or about. For now, finding this out may mean you’ll need to search online or just take your best guess (but we’re working towards having a tool where everything you need is included on the platform).

Versatility

Marina: One of the other things that is often forgotten is that people tend to think of customer service as just one area of translation, when actually it’s more of an umbrella term for lots of different disciplines, and this can make things difficult for translators.

Ben: In traditional translation, it’s common to have a type of text that you’re used to working with, and generally while there’s a little bit of room for manoeuvre this is always done within reason. You wouldn’t, for example, suddenly expect a translator who has a background in medieval poetry to start working on medical journals with just a few moments’ notice.

However, one of the key characteristics of a translator who works with customer service is that they really are the ‘Swiss Army knife’ of translators and are able to work with almost any content matter at the drop of a hat. This is particularly pertinent when thinking about technical support, where translators are unlikely to have much of a background in this area and are therefore heavily reliant on shaping their language around glossary terms and client requests. This takes real skill, but what is even more impressive is that this is done intermittently — not every email is going to be in that field, so it’s harder to practice and build up those skills. That’s why versatility has to be at the core of any customer service translation work.

Localization

Ben: Localization is a bit of an all-encompassing term that we tend to use in the translation world, but basically it comes down to making sure that the target text is palatable to the reader and is a good fit with their cultural and linguistic standpoint. It’s also one of the things that consistently causes challenges for translators, and in the vast majority of our Language Guidelines at Unbabel you’ll find a section dedicated entirely to localization challenges.

Marina: The trouble comes with the fact that you’re not just translating the words from one email into another email in a different language — you’re also looking for cultural nuances, formatting, and other linguistic elements that will change depending on the audience. One of the ones that we consistently see is with date formats or other conversions, for example where the agent who has written the email is using the US date format (MM-DD-YY), but you know that translating this directly into an email that is going to reach someone in a European market is likely to cause a whole host of trouble. Part of being an excellent customer service translator is learning to spot these things, and this isn’t likely to change any time soon. Oh, and incidentally, if you do come across this example or others like it, don’t forget to check the context — you can usually find a clue in there which will help you decide.

What difficulties have you encountered in working with customer service translation? Let us know in the comments below so we can talk about them next time!