LPP SA is a Polish clothing company that has been growing by leaps and bounds. In the last 27 years it has built a strong position on the European and Middle East markets. Currently, it operates in 21 countries, where it has over 1,700 shops. The company owns House, Cropp, Mohito, Sinsay and Reserved brands, whose advertising campaigns are spoken highly of by both consumers and experts. Reserved’s flagship store is located in Oxford Street, the busiest shopping street in Europe.
Needs and challenges
When expanding outside Poland, LPP looked for a vendor who would be able to ensure continuously high quality of corporate and marketing communications originally created in Polish. The need for a stable team of experienced translators and project managers supervising the cooperation at every stage was self-explanatory.
LPP is a very demanding Customer in terms of the number of target languages, text volumes and deadlines. The translators must be well-versed in clothing and fashion terminology used in the market. Additionally, the target market for each of the five brands is different, so specific materials require the translators to be conversant with varying writing styles and registers. This calls for subject matter expertise and vast experience in transcreation, that is translation that focuses mostly on rendering the connotations and functionalities of the source text.
Solution
We started to cooperate with LPP in August 2016. Stage one was to translate materials from Polish into Czech, German, English, Hungarian, Romanian, Russian and Slovakian. Already after the first few jobs, the Customer confirmed that the both the quality of translations and the cooperation model presented meet their expectations in full. Currently, after LPP’s marketing efforts have been reorganised in some countries and the company expanded into new markets, we regularly provide translations into German, Hungarian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Latvian and Romanian.
For each target language, we have built a permanent team of experts, native speakers translating directly out of Polish. For those languages where it was not possible or we were not satisfied with the results, we offered the Customer the choice of translating from English. This happened, for example, with Estonian.
Some of the content that Studio Gambit partners translate includes:
- product names (names of clothes and other products available in Reserved, Cropp, House, Mohito, and Sinsay online stores)
- product descriptions (often very creative texts of various lengths)
- legal texts, e-mails to customers and newsletters.
How important is transcreation for our work? It is worth noting that the clothing industry attaches a lot of weight to accurate rendering of often very specialised product names. Subtle differences in meaning can be difficult to convey if we consider that, for instance, the Polish word for ‘jacket’ can mean a ‘coat’, a ‘parka’, an ‘overcoat’, a ‘puffer’, ‘winter’, ‘bomber’, ‘trench’, or ‘pea coat’. Skills and experience of the translators are the key to conveying the manufacturer’s intention in a precise manner. The translator needs to be able to create an appealing text, which sometimes diverges from the source.
Summary in numbers From August 2016 to October 2018: 1,579,000 words translated; 10 target languages; 41 translators, editors and proofreaders.
Customer benefits
The on-demand availability of trusted translation services made it significantly easier for the Customer to expand into new markets.
- A flexible model of cooperation makes a translation task a regular business process with an easily corrected cost budget.
- The speed and reliability of services provided by Studio Gambit helps in keeping the deadlines of planned changes in the assortment of products and their accompanying advertising campaigns. Texts translated by Studio Gambit are published on Customer’s websites directly after translation, as they no longer need to be approved by marketing teams in their respective countries, which eliminates one of the potential issues from the list.
For Studio Gambit, the best proof of the lasting and real value of the services provided to LPP is the ongoing cooperation where we can help in tackling even more new challenges.
