About SANOFI
Sanofi is a major global pharmaceutical and healthcare company headquartered in Paris, France, focused improving patients’ lives through its work in specialty care, vaccines, and general medicines. Its careers department operates a sophisticated global talent acquisition function that emphasizes the company’s purpose-driven mission to attract candidates to diverse roles in research, manufacturing, commercial, and support functions.
Customer requirement
SANOFI called upon the services of HI-COM to translate its English careers web site, containing around 20,000 words. This was not a typical translation task. The client had worked for many years to build a unique style and tone of voice for its brand, and when explaining its needs to HI-COM, they stressed the importance of maintaining these elements in the translations, not just into one or two target languages, but into seventeen!
HI-COM’s APPROACH
To meet the client’s aim of producing localized web content that speaks to specific audiences across the globe while maintaining the brand’s identity and message, HI-COM adopted a ‘transcreation’ approach.
The project can be broken down into a series of key stages:
Collection of source and reference material
We asked the client to provide us with as much reference material as possible, such as past copy, style guides, and tone-of-voice guidelines.
Resource selection and launch of translations:
We carefully selected translators and proofreaders with transcreation experience, and with expertise in the customer’s area of activity. This was not a straightforward task given the number of languages involved.
Choice of delivery format
We kept the copy of all 23 web pages in one single Excel file (one web page per tab), to enable the copy of each language to be read as one body work, to keep the style and tone consistent throughout, and to make each language easy to manage.
Delivery of translation drafts and customer feedback.
Our translations were delivered to our client according to a strict batch schedule, allowing for several rounds of modifications. This enabled the client to share our translations with its various country offices and departments, to ensure it had been fully localized for each market.
Final delivery
The rounds of modifications continued until all stakeholders were satisfied with the copy, and the entire project was completed on schedule.
Post-production
All translations were stored into our translation memories, enabling corrections and updates to be made smoothly, and at a low cost for the client.
