JSI Case Study
The confidence to take on more complex challenges
About JSI Telecom
“Art One Translations has enabled JSI to win new business.”
JSI Telecom is a leader in collection management programs and analysis for law enforcement and intelligence organizations. Headquartered in Kanata, Ontario, they offer clients training, cell site mapping, technical support, and more.
Challenge
JSI Telecom needs to translate highly sensitive information for law enforcement and intelligence agencies. This requires exacting, high-quality reliability and attention to detail in translations in a range of languages, such as French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, and Arabic. “Our clients require the utmost in security and due diligence,” explains Patti Waddell, Senior Technical Writer with Localization Prime, part of JSI.
Unfortunately, previous efforts to utilize machine translation had proven ineffective and failed to reach the standard required. “It was coming out unbelievably garbled. We learned that from our people in the field,” Waddell says.
The problem was not confined to service delivery; it was impacting business development as well. “It comes down to credibility. We’d be standing in front of a client at a presentation and they’d be reacting to the translation on the screen and the quality was literally so bad our audience would laugh out loud. Trainers trying to explain something in a different language would often get caught out with a mistranslation on the screen and have to apologize as they explained things.”
This situation threatened their core business, and they needed to adapt quickly to provide better outcomes for their clients.
Solution
JSI Telecom began to search for a company that could outperform the machine translation they had been receiving.
As JSI’s team was considering a number of software localization vendors, a colleague forwarded them a timely communication from Art One Translations. “We had a document coming out and used it as a test piece,” Waddell says. “They were so professional, so organized and they just blew the competition out of the water with their turnaround time and quality of translations. They just nailed it—and we knew then that they could do the work.”
Since that first collaboration JSI has used Art One Translations for all their software localization needs: from interface and strings translations, documentation updates, and formatting in Framemaker to installation and maintenance guides, release notes, warranty and service agreements, online help texts, marketing documents, and more.
Results
Having Art One Translations take care of all of JSI’s translation and software localization needs has not just eliminated the problem of mistranslations—it has given their firm the confidence to take on more complex challenges for their clients.
“Translating Arabic, for instance, comes with many technical challenges, but Art One has delivered beyond our expectations,” Waddell has commented. “Before, the cost overruns on that language alone was 100 percent over budget; Art One does the work on budget and in half the time! We can see that in all that they do, they put so much integrity into it. Communication is good, they check timelines and they save us a lot of internal time and resources in the process. On a recent Arabic translation project, we saved over $50,000 and two months.”
Art One Translations has enabled JSI to win new business. On business-development documentation like RFPs with prospective customers, their fast turn-around time and reliability has been a “game-changer”.
