our work – Saatchi Gallery
Reimagining the Saatchi Gallery’s art collection
Services: Human translation and consultancy
Industries: Literature & the Arts, Marketing and PR
The Saatchi Gallery is one of London’s most prestigious contemporary art galleries.
Originally opened in 1985 to display the private collection of advertising executive Charles Saatchi to the public, the gallery, which today stands on King’s Road, Chelsea, welcomes 1.5 million visitors per year, with over 2000 schools organising student visits. In the last five years, Saatchi Gallery has presented 15 of the 20 most visited museum exhibitions in London.
Website localisation for Chinese visitors
To better cater to their increasingly international audience, Saatchi Gallery required a full website localisation and translation into Chinese. The project, which involved more than 800,000 words of descriptions of artworks and artist biographies, was essential for the gallery to continue to compete effectively with other art institutions in a crowded marketplace – as well as promoting London as an international destination.
Saatchi Gallery required a full website localisation and translation into Chinese, involving more than 800,000 words of descriptions of artworks and artist biographies.
Our expertise
We selected a large team of native Chinese linguists with expertise of art history and substantial experience of creative writing. However, after consultations with the client, it soon became obvious that a straightforward translation would be insufficient for the quality that Saatchi Gallery required – it simply wouldn’t convey the same writing style and conceptual thinking in Chinese.
It was agreed that our linguists would provide a complete rewrite of the website, faithful to the English source text and utilising Translation Memory to maintain cost-effectiveness. The final output, which was delivered in HTML files to ensure that text displayed correctly on-screen, was supplied in time for the delivery deadline, and we’ve since had the pleasure of working together with Charles Saatchi’s other businesses, too.
