The Struggle for Ukraine

Assymetry of translated content in a UK multilingual news website – lessons for Ukrainian translators?” was the title of a presentation organised by the Runa language agency on 26th June 2015 in the George Hotel in Lviv. It was given by George Witherington, a visiting translator and author from London. He had previously taught a number of master classes on translation and economics & finance in Lviv for Runa.

The presentation summarised the findings of his 2011 45-page report: Measuring the Cost of Translating All Content into All Target Languages. The report estimated the percentages of the English-language master content generated annually by a UK-based industrial news service that were translated into the advertised seven target languages (Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Turkish, Polish, Italian).

The estimated actual translated content was then costed to gauge how much the company was spending each year on translation and how much it would cost to translate all content into all languages. This made it possible to perform a “stress test” to see whether the company could bear the financial strain of actual and 100% translation. This was done by calculating the cost margins on sales revenue of actual and 100% translation.

An abbreviated version of the 2011 main report entitled “Content Gaps on Multilingual Websites: a Financial Explanation (December 2015)” has now been posted in the master class section of our website. It summarises the methodology and results of the main 45-page report.

Content Gaps on Multilingual Websites: a Financial Explanation (December 2015) (1.06mb, pdf)