Making Sense out of Outsourcing Localization to China - Part 1

If you have not yet tested the waters of offshore LSPs, consider making 2008 the year in which you take the plunge. You know you are going to do it sooner or later, and if you don’t, your successor will, so you may as well learn the lesson for yourself.

In 2007, one of our clients embarked on a localization project with a Chinese vendor. This brought me, in my role as consulting localization project manager on the client’s side, onto the leading edge of the project. Misgivings? Yes, I had a few:

· The company had no visible qualifications as a localization vendor, though they had devoted lots of Web space and marketing to testing, data analysis, application development, sustaining engineering, payroll processing, helpdesk and data mining. How can you be very good at anything when you specialize in everything?

· Against the same request for proposal, the company’s bid on the project was about 25% lower than that of two other Western LSPs. It didn’t help that they misread the RFP and omitted a big chunk of work, but even if they’d included it, they would still have been 15-20% below the other vendors. What kind of quality would we get for a price that low?

· The target language was Korean, not Chinese, which meant that, as low a price per word as they were offering me, some vendor in Korea was almost certainly offering them an even lower one. What caliber of linguistic talent could we expect?

· Our client imposed a project deadline bordering on the preposterous, which annihilated precious time I wanted the vendor to devote to editing and QA. Midway through the project the deadline changed to allow some more time, but it had already introduced a great deal of stress.

· The lingua franca of the project was English (because I don’t speak Chinese). While the vendor’s efforts were valiant, their English was weak, and I foresaw this as a problem even before we had awarded the project.

· Replete as the Western news media were in 2007 with recalls on Chinese toothpaste, toys, cots, tires, medicine, pet food and other products, it was easy to tar this company/industry with the same brush and worry about their level of quality assurance.

Despite these carefully articulated misgivings, our client’s decision-makers had already made up their mind (and corporate direction) to award the project to the Chinese vendor. So, since it was my charter to make it work, we built checkpoints into the project to detect problems as soon as they arose.

I'll describe these checkpoints and the upshot of the project in next week's post.

If you enjoyed this post, please read the related article, "Offshoring and localization projects, Part I."