STAR TS Translation Services Blog

Social Media Awards 2012 – STAR Social Media Campaign Recognition

Co. Dublin, Ireland — May 2012 — STAR Translation Services is delighted to announce its social media team has been shortlisted for the Bord Gáis Energy Social Media Awards 2012.

News Release
For Immediate Release
May 2012

STAR was recently nominated for the Bord Gáis Energy Social Media Awards 2012. 100 judges took part in the shortlist process. The final list will be revealed next week but we are already very pleased to announce our nomination for this national event. We have been nominated in 4 categories:
• Online PR Campaign (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube…)
• Video/ Video Campaign (Non-Broadcast)
• Best Business Twitter account – marketing, sales sponsored

The winners will be announced at the finale ceremony which will takes place at the Mansion House in Dublin on May 17th, 2012.

Taking part in this special event and being nominated means a lot to STAR. It is the chance to be recognized for our hard work. For those who are following us, you might have noticed that we are indeed very active through our blog, Facebook page, Twitter account and even our YouTube channel to provide our customers and partners with the best tips regarding translation, languages and Irish.
STAR was formed in 2002, since then we do our best to help our clients grow their business. This is why this year STAR has focused so much on social media. We want to inform our customer that we are always here and ready to help their business to grow worldwide.

We already know that the competition will be tough since we are up against Jedward in one of them for instance. You can follow team STAR by:

• Liking our Facebook page : www.facebook.com/startranslation
• Following us on Twitter : www.twitter.com/startranslation
• Visiting our Blog : http://www.star-ts.com/translation-blog

View all the nominations and find more information on Social Media Award 2012.

About STAR:
Based in Dublin, STAR TS provides translation services in over 40 global languages. It translates documents and websites to enable clients to do more international business every day. With more than 800 people worldwide in the STAR Group, we give you confidence in a translated world. http://www.star-ts.com

Damian Scattergood and Paul Quigley founded STAR-TS in 2001. The entrepreneurs have successfully grown the company to a leading language agency in Ireland in the 10 years they have been in business together.

Further information:
Damian Scattergood
Managing Director: STAR Dublin
Email: dsm@star-ts.com
Phone: +353 (0)1 8365614

STAR Technology Solutions
Docklands Innovation Park, 128-130 East Wall Road, Dublin 3, Ireland
Phone: +353 (0)1 8365614
Fax: +353 (0)1 8364644
Web: www.star-ts.com

Translation Planning: Japan Showa Day 29^th April / Public Hol 30^th – Japan.
Most companies will be closed in Japan 29^th and 30^th of April for the Japan Showa Day. Projects will be delivered on time as scheduled. Please take into consideration for all translation and export planning.

Global Holiday Calendar

Among or Amongst ?

We are often asked what the difference is between two words and which is most appropriate for a given text.

So this Monday our question is: Among or Amongst, which is correct?

For once it is an easy answer: You can actually use both of them. Either “amongst” and “among” is correct.

“Among” seems to be more appropriate and popular in modern writing. Indeed, when writing news “among” appears the most used one.

On the other hand, you can use amongst when writing fiction like fairytales.  It is a bit old-fashioned so it suits the context and style of fictional stories.

By STAR Translation Services

Probably one of the biggest dilemmas for marketing managers today is whether they are seen to be spamming their clients or not. Marketeers have to communicate with current and prospective clients and do so on a daily basis. So how do you know if your emails are being caught as spam or are being received favorably by your clients.

A good place to start your education and testing is with the Swiftpage email delivery system. We use the system ourselves and we find it very useful.

Check your email spam rating online:
Swiftpage have an automated system to check and rate your emails before you send them. So you have the ability to get a good idea of how antispam software would view your email. Check your email here.

Online ‘deliverability’ education:
They also provide online education / video and tutorials in how best to create spam free emails. Visit Swiftpage email marketing.

By STAR Translation Services

Bill Payne angel investor and Damian Scattergood of STAR translation at HotHouse event on Fundable Startups.

Thursday 19th April 2012 was a fantastic day here in Docklands when we had the chance to meet Bill Payne, Americas 2009 Angel Investor of the year. Bill has invested in over 50 companies including DoubleClick. His successful track record makes amazing reading.

Bill was visiting the Hothouse entrepreneurship program based in Docklands Innovation Park where STAR has its Dublin office.  So it was great to be able to meet and discuss this topic with him. The title of his presentation was “Fundable Companies” which caught my eye straight away. At the end of the day the real question for any investor or managing director is : “Is the project or company actually fundable?” All too often business plans have great ideas and lots of out of the air sales figures and projections but what investors look for is what the core business actually is.

Management Team is key.

One of the key factors that Bill highlighted was the strength of the management team. You may have a great product and a million dollar market, but can you actually manage the company when it gets to that size? As companies grow you have to evaluate your management skills (across the company) and ascertain who is the right person to manage it and what skills they require. The skills to manage a 5 person startup are not the same as those required to manage a 100 person company.  Sometimes a CEO has to decide and plan when they need to be replaced. If you are looking to have an exit sale of your company perhaps it is better to put in a CEO that has done it before so they can manage up and out for that trade sale.

But I’m Only A Startup.

Ok so you might not be the million dollar company looking to be bought out if you are just a startup. Again Bill offered some excellent advice on how to manage the early start investment (or whatever cash you had) and how to focus on building your company. Start-up companies should first consider:

1.Where to focus?

2.How to spend and manage cash?

3.And where to build the correct value in your organization?

Angels are people too.

Young entrepreneurs often forget that Angels are people too. They have the same concerns and worries about a business as you do. They may have the money you need to build a company but have to be careful where they put it. Bill told us that 50% of his investments go nowhere. That’s a lot of money to lose. So he looks for companies that might deliver back 20 times return. If you were looking to have an angel invest between 500k and 1 million in your company, they would be looking at getting 20 million in a trade sale in perhaps 5 years. So think before you leap.

The Top 7 Tips Bill gave us where:

1. Management team is important.

2. Scalability: Your business needs to be able to scale fast (production, people and management skills).

3. Angel investors tend to invest in local companies – so do you homework on who is in your area.

4. Potential fund-able companies should be customer ready. You should have some customers and a little traction in the market. Angel money gives you the funding you need to scale, it is not research money.

5. Competitive Advantage: You need to have some form of competitive advantage. If someone can copy you tomorrow and take the market away forget it. It doesn’t mean you need IP rights etc, this can come later, just an edge to get the first 10 million in sales!

6. Niche Markets helps. If you are in a market the big companies aren’t looking at, you can take market share quickly.

7. Sales and marketing plan: Make sure you have a proper sales plan. Not we’ll get 1% of the market by 2012. How are you actually going to sell your product?

If you are interested in learning more about Bill Paynes system for ensuring you are investment ready check out his website on http://www.billpayne.com/

Are you investable ? – follow Bill here

By STAR Translation Services

Enterprise Ireland’s new program to help first time exporters.

Damian Scattergood and Rena Cushion from Enterprise Ireland Get Export Ready program discussing languages for exporters.

Last Wednesday we attend Enterprise Irelands export event in the Clarion Hotel in Santry. It was a very interesting event focused on EI’s new “Get Export Ready” program.

With so many companies in Ireland growing their international businesses the event was really well attended.

The guest speaker was John Byrne of Byrne Looby Partners, International Consulting Engineers who shared his experiences in developing overseas markets such as Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi etc. They’ve done a great job in a tough business environment.

The day also covered EI’s “Get Export Ready” program which has recently been launched. This new program outlines all the key areas for any new business going into international markets, from market research, funding, advice and on-going training.

The site offers a free Export Ready Healthcheck that you can complete and enables you to build your business plan for exporting.

By developing your business overseas you can ..

• Spread the business risk across markets
• Open your company to new ideas for products and services
• Achieve greater economies of scale and become more cost-competitive
• Enhance your credibility with customers
• Increase the skills, knowledge and expertise within your company

There was a number of great hints and tips given on the day to help you gain traction in your new markets.

A topic that was asked during the Q&A’s was about language translation and how you can do business in another country when you don’t speak the language? We found this one a really good question as there isn’t a single answer to this. It really depends on your business model and how you choose to enter the target market. If you’re interested in this area you can also download our whitepaper on Going Global – which has lots of hints and tips on how to design and prepare for translation before you enter a new market. Download Here:

Another interesting question was around English. Perhaps a simpler approach for first time exporters is to just target countries that speak English only. Good idea.

What countries speak English as their primary language?

Google Search Engine Changes

In March Google made some 50 changes to the Google Search Engine – all positive and making an impact on our SEO work.

The changes include items such as:

• Better indexing of profile pages. [launch codename "Prof-2"] This change improves the comprehensiveness of public profile pages in the Google index from more than two-hundred social sites.
• High-quality sites algorithm data update and freshness improvements. [launch codename “mm”, project codename "Panda"] Like many of the changes Google make, aspects of the high-quality sites algorithm depend on processing that’s done offline and pushed. In the past month, Google has pushed updated data for “Panda,”
• Live results for UEFA Champions League and KHL. Google have added live-updating snippets in search results for the KHL (Russian Hockey League) and UEFA Champions League, including scores and schedules. Now you can find live results from a variety of sports leagues, including the NFL, NBA, NHL and others.
• Tennis search feature. [launch codename "DoubleFault"] Google have introduced a new search feature to provide realtime tennis scores at the top of the search results page. Try [maria sharapova] or [sony ericsson open].
• Fresher image predictions in all languages. [launch codename "imagine2", project codename "Suggest"] Google recently rolled out a change to surface more relevant image search predictions in autocomplete in English. This improvement extends the update to all languages.
• Tweaks to handling of anchor text. [launch codename "PC"]. So this makes for better quality link scores.
• Fewer undesired synonyms. [project codename "Synonyms"] When you search on Google, it often identifies other search terms that might have the same meaning as what you entered in the box (synonyms) and surface results for those terms as well when it might be helpful. This month they tweaked a classifier to prevent unhelpful synonyms from being introduced as content in the results set.
• Better handling of queries with both navigational and local intent.
• Better local results and sources in Google News.
• Improvements to Image Search relevance.
• Tweaks to language detection in autocomplete.

For the full list of changes see Googles Insider blog.

Building Brics

Our newsletter this month focuses on our core business of translation.

During Seachtain na Gaeilge we promoted our Irish translation services on social media like YouTube and Facebook. Meanwhile we are also focusing on expanding markets in the BRIC countries. STAR already has a BRIC presence supporting Brazil, Russia, India and China so we can share our knowledge on these expanding countries.  Finally we’ve been recognised for our quality and hard work by being nominated for 2 separate awards.

BRIC : Brazil, Russia, India and China are the hot topic of discussion in translation and export markets right now. According to the Goldman Sachs’ report, China and India will become the dominant global supplier for manufactured goods and services. Meanwhile, Brazil and Russia will become the dominant players for raw materials and energy.

STAR helps clients who do business in BRIC countries by providing translation services for Documents, Websites and Manuals. If you’re doing business in any BRIC country – STAR can assist you with your language requirements.

Want More BRIC?

What are the best languages to translate into? As a translation company we provide translation in over 45 languages including Irish from our offices here in Dublin 3. We analyzed all our translation for 2011 and are happy to publish the results for our global readers. The top 3 are:

1. German

2. French

3. Irish

As you might imagine our closest international neighbors are top with German and French being the most popular languages we translated last year. Irish was the 3rd most popular language being our native language.

For more results visit out top 10 languages page.

STAR spoke Irish for Language Week – with the launch of our “Irish Word of The Day” Videos . The short video series taught people how to speak a number of Irish words and sentences. You can watch the videos here on http://www.youtube.com/startranslation

What is the correct abbreviation for Doctor?

This week we are having a big debate about this one and we’re still not decided who won. There are multiple camps in this space.
Share your point of view with us – Which abbreviation do you use and why?

Follow the Dr. discussion here:

Budget 2012s finer details were released recently in the Finance Bill 2012 which contains a significant number of items that favour Foreign Direct Investments into Ireland such as:

• Research & Development (R&D) relief
• Foreign Earnings Deduction (FED)
• Special Assignee Relief Programme (SARP)
• 0% corporation tax rate for new companies.

For further information, see Finance Bill 2012

We’re delighted to tell you we’ve been nominated for 2 separate awards for our service and social media work.

Bord Gáis Social Media Awards 2012
Our Social media work has been recognized by the fact that we are nominated in 4 separate categories. You can see all the nominations here: socialmediaawards.com

Entrepreneurial Business Awards (EBA) 2012:
For our customer services and entrepreneurial drive building our business over the last few years STAR has been shortlisted for the Dublin Entrepreneurial Business Awards!

It is fantastic to have our hard work recognized by the market and our customers so thank you all for your continued support and business.

Mandarin Chinese is the most spoken language in business after english

Mandarin is the official spoken language in China. It is spoken by 845 million people. According to Bloomberg Rankings, it is now scored highest in a ranking of languages for business usefulness, excluding English.

The Rankings takes into account:

-the number of speakers,

-the number of countries where the language is official,

-economical rates,

-educational rates…

Doing business in Asia will call more and more for language abilities to be successful in non-English-speaking countries. It provides advantages by being closer to the culture and habits and it also favors connections in a faster and more complex business environment.

French with 68 million speakers and Arabic with 221 speakers are ranked second and third. Spanish came in fourth ranking with 329 speakers worldwide.

Source: Bloomberg.com

Mandarin and Cantonese are often confused when people request translation services for China. It is easy to confuse them as the written form can be different depending on the country you are in. We’ve produced a simple table explaining the differences between Chinese languages and dialects for you.

by STAR Translation Services

We’re delighted to tell you that STAR has been nominated for the Bord Gáis Energy Social Media Awards 2012. Our followers will know over the last 6 months we’ve been blogging, facebooking and twittering like mad to tell everyone about translation and language. Its been really hard work, but great fun too.

Videos: We’ve a couple of great videos we produced including our learn to speak Irish videos. See our Youtube Channel.

The culmination of all the hard work is that we are nominated in 4 separate categories in the Bord Gáis Energy awards.

• Online PR Campaign
• Blog of a Business
• Video/ Video Campaign (Non-Broadcast)
• Best Business Twitter account – marketing, sales sponsored

The competition will be tough. We’re up against Jedward in one of them!

So wish us Good Luck! You can see the entire nomination list on Social Media Award 2012.

By STAR Translation Services