Translating for the textile industry

QuickSilver partners with a number of leading textile and clothing companies, including Inditex, Bershka and Blanco.

One of the keys to these companies’ success is their ability to respond rapidly and effectively to the market – the Inditex group, for example, restocks their stores twice a week. Thanks to an incredibly precise and dynamic system for evaluating sales and consumer behaviour, Inditex is able to stay right on the curve.An important aspect of their responsiveness is the continual updating of online catalogues, marketing collateral etc. This updating entails a continual stream of small changes – of product descriptions, for example.

And, given that these companies are multinational, any change on their ‘main’ website must also be integrated into the versions of the website in other languages. This is where QuickSilver comes in! The various different types of Translation Memory software we use make this sort of continual updating quicker, cheaper and all but hassle free.

But, contrary to what one might expect, pithy product descriptions are quite difficult to translate. They are often ‘ungrammatical’, i.e not full sentences, and employ a wide range of specialised terminology. In addition, when extracting the text into a Translation Memory in order to make the process more efficient, some context is lost.

Even though we establish a comprehensive glossary with the client, there are still a number of potential pitfalls and headaches. Blouse or top? Pants or trousers? Navy blue or dark blue? Remember that we are working on these translations ‘blind’, that is, without any pictures or contextualising information.

Here we stray into the world of ‘preferences vs. mistakes‘, which we have looked at at length elsewhere. The key thing is that this is yet another field in which the translator can (indeed, should) be specialised.