Insurance and Human Resources Consulting
Translation of Employee Health Insurance Survey
Translation, desktop publishing
Spanish
About 1,000 words
1 business day
One of the world’s largest insurance and human resource consulting firms (the Client) wanted to ensure that the employees of one of their customers, a large restaurant chain, fully understood and benefitted from their health insurance offerings. After crafting questions and creating an interactive online survey for employees to report their knowledge and use of their employer’s health benefits, the Client realized that many of their customer’s employees had limited English proficiency. The Client turned to Paragon to make the survey accessible to these employees for a more complete analysis of their customer’s data.
Although primarily focused on offering insurance products to diverse businesses types, the Client also offers Human Resources and Risk Management consulting to its customers. Working together with one of their customers, a restaurant chain with locations across the country and thousands of employees, the Client sought to determine how well these employees understood and utilized the health insurance policy provided by the Client to their employer. The Client and customer created a 25-question survey, including both multiple choice and open-ended questions, but realized that many employees had limited understanding of English and would better answer questions provided in Spanish. The timeline of the survey’s availability and administration could not be extended to meet this new language requirement, so the Client turned to Paragon to expedite production of the survey content in Spanish. Unfortunately, the Client was not able to provide the English content in an editable form (only PDF captures of the online survey were available as the source for translation), which added another level of complexity, and most importantly, time, to the project. Because some of the questions required open-ended responses (“Please describe areas of your employee benefits which you do not fully understand or would like to learn more about:”), the Client needed employees’ answers provided in Spanish to be translated back into English for analysis.
The first step upon receipt of the Client’s source PDFs was to quickly compile a manuscript of the source English text into a renderable format, in this case, Microsoft Word. Using a manuscript instead of an image file like a PDF allowed Paragon to leverage our computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools. After CAT analysis, Paragon’s linguists had mere hours to complete translation, editing, and proofreading, but because of the size and depth of our network of linguists, highly qualified linguists were ready and able to meet this tight deadline. Close communication with the Client ensured time was not wasted in an unnecessary desktop publishing phase, as the Client confirmed that they would be able to use our Spanish manuscript and take care of formatting themselves within the survey platform. Any responses to open ended questions that employees provided in Spanish were sent to Paragon for back-translation into English so that the Client could provide its customer with employee feedback, as well as incorporate this feedback into the Client’s own insurance service offerings.