International formula clicks for chemicals

Specialist chemicals are a key to the work of many academics, researchers, product designers and manufacturers. Today the Internet brings them into easy reach wherever in the world they are working. Although most of the international scientific community use a common language for the technical specifications, when it comes to describing the product, it is much better to have the details in their own native language.

For Alfa Aesar, a leading manufacturer and supplier of research chemicals, metals and materials, the Internet offers unlimited international reach with its catalogue containing over 33,000 products accessible on line. By 2009, Alfa Aesar had several websites across the world, each one with different capabilities. "So we tried to bring everything together and create one global website that would serve every market," explains Mara Nieuwsma, Alfa Aesar’s Marketing Manager in North America.

A new website, with strong branding and consistent messaging was developed in English and McFelder Translations was commissioned to translate it into Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Korean.

"Obviously, the translations became very important. If you are getting into highly technical specifics it’s much better if the customer can understand it in their native language," says Mara.

The new global website went live in 2009. "It has definitely helped in having brand consistency and being able to have all the messaging consistent and available to our customers who speak different languages," she adds.

The expertise of McFelder’s degree-qualified translators comes into its own on a project like this, but it is a two-sided partnership, as McFelder director, Fiona McCrae, explains: "They have their own native speakers, so when they suggest changes, we add them to customer’s own technical glossary so that they will be used next time they come up in an Alfa Aesar project."

Mara adds: "There is a lot of specific terminology that does need expertise and the McFelder team have been working with us long enough, so that they know a lot of these terms. We have the added benefit of having our own technical experts and chemists on staff, so when we get the translations back we always have them cross checked to make sure that those technical terms are being represented accurately. We feed that back to McFelder so that they can use those modified technical translations moving forward."

This collaborative approach ensures consistency in the service McFelder provides. "They are very easy to work with. We always know what we are going to get, so the results we get are very consistent. It’s a good system," says Mara.

Alfa Aesar’s multi-lingual website is an important marketing tool for the company, which is part of the Johnson Matthey group. Extending its linguistic reach is a good way of expanding into emerging markets. Mara explains: "Russia is an example of a market we are hoping to develop more. We have just added Russian to the website in advance of that, in the hope of building that market."

With the McFelder partnership in place, expanding the website into Russian was a straightforward step. "Having that capability [to add languages] built in and a partner that we can automatically go to, to get the language translated and put up quickly, makes that a lot easier," she adds.