How I Plan to Target Swiss Direct Clients

Yet another Swiss text to translate. I've never been to Switzerland (unless you count quickly passing through on the way to somewhere else in Europe), but as I wrote previously I'm becoming quite familiar with Swiss business German. With the Euro in crisis, maybe Switzerland is the place to find direct clients. So how would I go about this?

That's actually a good question, since directories of foreign companies are hard to find at my local business library here in Brooklyn, NY. The library does have a German company directory, but not a Swiss or Austrian one. So I tried to come up with a game plan for finding and then targeting potential Swiss clients:

1. Create a tri-fold brochure specifically geared towards Switzerland (based on my generic brochure) and have a small number printed by a low-cost online printer.
2. Use the Swiss version of Google (www.google.ch) to search for Swiss IT, transportation/logistics and other technology companies.
3. For each company found, check whether or not its website has an English version and note contact information for the person who is most likely to handle translations.
4. Search for these contact people, as well as their companies, on the LinkedIn and Xing professional networks, note additional details on their background and see whether I can invite them into my network.
5. Consider getting a paid subscription to either or both networks, so I can contact people "out of my network", then contact those I cannot invite into my network otherwise.
6. Follow up with an e-mail several weeks later detailing my experience in translating Swiss texts, as well as with relevant subject matter (IT, etc...). Offer a free short test translation. Mention LinkedIn/Xing connection and announce brochure mailing.
7. For any replies saying that they don't handle translations, ask who does and e-mail that person. Also find them on one or both professional networks and connect there.
8. Three weeks later, mail the brochure created in Step 1, with a cover letter detailing previous contacts.
9. A month later send follow-up e-mail inquiring whether they received the brochure and would like a free test translation.

I'm not sure what I will do after that last step, but this should keep me busy for a while with marketing.

"Schwyzerdütsch" in IT

Somehow I wound up with several IT-related translations from Swiss German this week. While written Swiss business German is much closer to standard German than one would expect when hearing the spoken language, it does have its peculiarities. Oddly, a number of Swiss words and phrases -- at least in the IT world -- seem much closer to their English equivalent than to the corresponding word or phrase used in Germany.

On the other hand, I sometimes have to resort to googling Swiss websites (via www.google.ch) to find out what a particular term means. So far I have always been able to find at least a website that uses the term in enough context and/or explains it so I can figure out what is meant, even if most of these websites do not appear to be bilingual. Come to think of it, many of the Swiss German websites I have encountered in this way not only didn't have an English version, but also didn't appear to have been translated into French or Italian, the other official Swiss languages. That seems a little odd, especially after browsing a number of Canadian website that all opened with a page to choose the English or French versions -- although admittedly these were websites in Quebec.

In any case, a couple of years back I had a spate of Swiss texts to translate and finally bought myself a Swiss German-English dictionary (the well-known German dictionary publisher Langenscheidt produces such a dictionary). While this helps with general business texts, it's a relatively small general-purpose dictionary that lacks many IT-specific terms. Does anyone know about a Swiss German-English IT dictionary?

Then again, I remember calling IT support in Switzerland when I was the network supervisor for a department in a Swiss bank in New York. Most of the people I spoke with weren't Swiss and spoke German (or French or Italian) as a second (or third) language. Since many of them were Indian (not an outsourced help desk, but Indians living in Zurich), we communicated much more easily in English than in German. So I wonder whether some of the more English-sounding IT terms I am encountering are indeed Swiss German or were coined by IT personnel who is more at home in English than in Swiss German.

It might be interesting to speak to people at IT-related companies in Switzerland about this, but I doubt I will have a chance to visit there any tiime soon...

Happy St. Parick's Day!

I already celebrated St. Patrick's Day a few weeks back, when friends hosted an Irish brunch before the St. Patrick's Day parade in Queens. Since New York hosts several such parades, they are held on different weekends, starting in early March.

A few years back I read a newspaper article about how Dublin was becoming the Silicon Valley of the translation industry. It does seem to make sense that a country with a relatively high level of education and English as the majority language would turn to translation as an industry that needs no natural resources and has relatively low start-up costs. On the other hand, one would expect that role to be filled by a country where most of the population already grows up bilingual - Belgium, say, or Switzerland.

To be sure, Canada appears to have a thriving translation industry - although much of it seems to be between English and French. And Swiss companies seem to outsource much of their German-English translation to other European translation agencies. I have had a fairly steady stream of Swiss German documents to be translated into English -- all from agencies outside Switzerland. Since Swiss business German is different from standard German, I assume there isn't such a large translation industry within the country -- or maybe there aren't enough native (or near-native) English speakers in Switzerland.

This leads me to a request for help: do any of you know of a good Swiss German business dictionary (preferably Swiss German - English, but Swiss German to standard German would work too)? I tracked one down, but it apparently is out of print. Thanks in advance for your help.

Until next week,
Barbara