“A cross-border consulting firm that supports companies expanding overseas.”

First of all, could you describe your company?

We provide consulting services to support Japanese companies entering overseas markets and foreign companies entering the Japanese market. Specific consulting services include planning, implementation, and support of strategies to enter the market.
Currently, our main clients are companies from both Japan and Korea, but we also support companies from the U.S. and other countries and regions in their expansion into Japan. We also provide advertising agency services for Japanese companies who wish to advertise in Korea.

H2 Interactive Co., Ltd. https://h2interactive.co.jp/

“We were doing a huge amount of translation work manually.”

What translation tasks and challenges have you faced in the past?

In the preparation stage of overseas expansion, there are many documents to be translated, such as contracts, market research documents, etc.
In addition, when we place advertisements, there are media materials and advertising reports that need to be translated everyday.
All of this translation work had been done manually until now, and translation tasks accounted for 20-30% of the total workload. We sometimes translated similar documents from scratch, which was inefficient, and the sheer volume of translation work was weighing on us mentally as well.

“YarakuZen is attractive for their easy-to-use edit page and their courteous customer support”

What was the background and deciding factor behind the introduction of YarakuZen?

Originally, I believed only human translations were worthwhile, but once I tried Google Translate on a whim, I found the translation accuracy to be surprisingly good and felt that it could be used for business in the future as well. Later, I participated in a webinar held by Yaraku and learned about ”YarakuZen”. As a result of the trial, it was very easy-to-use, and the pricing was reasonable, which led us to the decision to introduce YarakuZen.

Please let us know if there is anything you particularly like about YarakuZen.

On the edit page after machine-translated, the source and the target text are displayed in parallel, making it very easy to check the content sentence-by-sentence and edit it directly. Other AI translation tools display all the translated sentences in one column and it is hard to go back to the source text check and correct each time. Compared to them, YarakuZen saves us the labor of switching back-and-forth.
Machine translation is not perfect, and we believe that it is important for humans to edit the results. Thus we also find it attractive that the platform has many useful features for editing, such as Quality Assistant, Glossary and Phrases.
We also appreciate that the customer support staff is courteous and helpful.

“It has allowed us to focus on our core business and has greatly increased the speed of our operations. I would recommend it to any company that values speed.”

What effects have you seen since the introduction of the system?

The time required for translation, which used to be done manually, has been reduced to less than half. Within a few months of its introduction, we feel that we have already done a year’s worth of translations.
For example, we now have more cases where materials to be submitted to clients that used to take 2-3 days can be handled on the same day. We have been able to focus more on our core business, and the speed of our business has increased dramatically. Another factor could be that the translation work, which had been a mental burden as well, could now be done efficiently and handled with a positive attitude.

What type of company would you recommend YarakuZen to?

We have already talked about YarakuZen to many of our business partners, and especially for game companies that localize products, I think this tool will improve their operational efficiency. We would also recommend companies that deal with foreign advertisements, as they have a lot of translation work to do on a daily basis.

Do you have any points you would like YarakuZen to improve or expectations for the future?

It would be more convenient if you could support Hancom Office (file format), which is often used by Korean government offices, etc. YarakuZen currently has OCR support for PDFs, but it would be great if you could proceed to support translation of other image files, too.