Here’s a tale of offshoring gone wrong. This doesn’t qualify as horribly wrong, nor a disaster, but only because very little money was on the line.
I used to work for a small software company with a well-known product that has a long pedigree (it shall remain nameless, but our major competitor was WinRar). I actually miss working there — well, I miss most of it, but I did leave voluntarily. That’s a story for another time.
We had started translating our primary product into many languages, and we wanted to provide localized translations of our website as well. In order to save some cash, management decided that we would outsource and offshore the translation of our company website. Our new president knew of the perfect company to hire, too.
My boss — the VP — and the rest of the engineering and IT team were all a little nervous about dealing with this new company, not only because we didn’t have a great way to verify the work but also because we didn’t have a good relationship with the new president. (Distrust isn’t strong enough a word, but it describes it well enough for this story.) The first couple of sub-projects came back and looked ok, though, so we started to think we were over-worrying the problem.
Our process was to scrape our own english site, determine which pages and what snippets we would translate, and send those items as plain-text to the translators. After a couple of days we would start getting the translated documents back and we would build the site.
We had a few bumps along the way, such as getting plain-text documents with an unspecified code-page — we had asked for, but didn’t initially get, UTF-8, but we eventually had them send us the documents in Word to remove character-translation problems — but the process seemed to be working overall. We ran the the translated documents through Google Translate to make sure the reverse translation (back to English) looked ok, and it did. In retrospect, it was a little too perfect.
So, fast forward a couple of weeks, we get the third or fourth package back. My boss noticed something… odd on one of the pages. It was worth calling the rest of the team into the office to check it out, stat!
If you guessed that it was an artifact from Google Translate’s page – just a straight copy and paste from browser to Word document that picked up a little too much – you’d be correct. Cue immediate back-pedalling from the vendor that “it was just that one document” and “the other translations were done by hand” and by native speakers. Haha, not so much.
Author’s Note: Though this post may seem, at first glance, to be a warning against offshoring, it’s really a warning about hiring executives with too-cozy relationships with vendors. I’ve seen offshore projects go well and go sour, but the nepotism I saw with the above-mentioned new company president were almost always followed by a bitter taste in our mouths.