Localizing for Dun & Bradstreet: The Client’s Seal of Approval is a Must

Can you tell us a bit about your company?

Dun & Bradstreet provides category-defining data and analytical insights and uses its end-to-end solutions to guide winning strategies and intelligent actions. We are at the heart of our client’s key initiatives, and we are the difference that helps them grow revenue, increase margins, mitigate risk and maintain compliance. Dun & Bradstreet is differentiated by the scale, depth, diversity, and accuracy of our constantly expanding business data.

How did your collaboration with Ciklopea begin?

Actually, we inherited the collaboration from Bisnode that joined the Dun & Bradstreet family in 2021. Ciklopea had been providing translation and localization solutions into and from Croatian and Serbian to Bisnode for many years and we simply continued working with them.

What are your requirements for translation and localization?

We mostly require translation of various brochures, announcements, updates about our services and solutions, so we could say that it is mostly marketing translation.

How would you describe your collaboration with Ciklopea thus far?

Just like any other sector and any other company, we also use specific terminology that may be tricky to translate to another language while retaining the full scope of meaning and tone.

In addition, when the source material is segmented in the CAT software, part of the context may get lost and the translators may get slightly different ideas about the meaning and the purpose of the material.

These factors have led to an issue or two in the past, but nothing that wasn’t resolved quickly after an internal check on our part. Ciklopea’s teams have always been very responsive to our requests; they want to hear our feedback and advise on the best possible solutions.

Our internal reviewers are not professional linguists, but they know exactly what we want to achieve with any given material and they are fully aware of the precise meaning of specific terms. Ciklopea’s teams, in turn, have been ready and willing to accept our suggestions and provide linguistically correct solutions.

I believe that the best results come from a joint effort, and the fact that we are speaking today is proof enough that we are satisfied.

We share that belief too. In fact, we emphasize what we call the “client review”, i.e. harmonizing the final translation with the client’s feedback.

It is, in essence, a final seal of approval and the final quality assurance step because, no matter how hard one may try, they can never really know the client’s stylistic and terminological preferences – unless they learn them from the client.
Yet, if a translation is poor, it cannot simply be fine-tuned. However, if the work is of a professional standard with a completed linguistic review and quality assurance steps, it is easy to make edits to make it more, let’s say, fit for purpose.

Can you tell us a bit about your internal review process? Who are the people that review the translations, and do they check the translation against the source, or is it a monolingual review?

Our employees from the local branch offices check the translations, and I believe that they usually read the translation only. And that is a good thing because that puts them closer to the position of our target audiences as they review what will be published in local markets, so we may say that their primary task is to check whether something will be understandable and feel natural in the target market.

Ciklopea receives the suggested edits to the translation, and after a review, it sends us the finalized translation.

Since our translators and reviewers are always native speakers of the target language, we might say that your internal review is the second or even third in-country review of the translated materials

Something like that, yes. But it is all necessary.

We agree. Thank you!

Izabela Berlengi, Marketing Manager @Dun & Bradstreet d.o.o.