Verve – Multilingual Community Panel Moderation in Multiple Markets
Situation
Verve is the specialist in multilingual Community Panels for research, with offices in both London and Chicago. Verve partners with TOPPAN Digital Language – their main translation supplier – for the translation of their consumer studies, including surveys, invites and screeners, as well as the translation of their software platform. With the partnership continuing to evolve, Verve came to TOPPAN Digital Language for international online community panel moderation, involving several markets.
Challenge
As always, TOPPAN Digital Language was keen to help while also being aware of the challenges of online community moderation. These include timely and relevant replies to comments, creating content from scratch while making sure replies are consistent across markets, the need to probe in a friendly and encouraging manner to get respondents to develop insightful answers and comments, and ensuring efficiency within the agreed client timeline.
TOPPAN Digital Language handpicked a team of trusted native speakers and held a structured kick-off meeting before commencing the moderation. One of the community panels was used to identify typical comments that would need further probing. Verve provided examples of standard replies for cases where probing would be necessary, which the moderators translated into their native languages to ensure consistency across the 5 markets. These standard replies were of course adapted according to the context.
As it can prove tricky to estimate a panel’s activity and how many comments will need probing, a fixed initial moderation time was agreed with Verve. After that initial time, it was then re-assessed to see if further moderation was needed.
The Results
The TOPPAN Digital Language team was able to moderate the online panels for all markets and follow-up on responses, to keep the discussions active with high-value comments from participants. Since this first multilingual moderation project, TOPPAN Digital Language has been commissioned many more moderation projects by Verve. Through working in collaboration with their In-House Linguist Teams, TOPPAN Digital Language is always able to get their best trained, qualified linguists on the job.
” Working with TOPPAN Digital Language is such a rewarding experience. We mainly contact them for quick turnaround projects, mostly multi-country translations, with a high complexity level. The team always does their best to deliver the required translation prior to the agreed time-frame, and that is such a life-saver in the fast-paced environment that we work in. They always anticipate our needs, flag any issues that might appear, keep us updated on progress and deliver wonderful results. At this point I can honestly say, TOPPAN Digital Language is like a second team in our organization as they make collaboration so easy and fun. They are very professional, and their high standards match ours perfectly. ”
PROJECT MANAGER, VERVE
