If you are in the business of handling a consumer, or high level B2B PR campaign there are many pan-European clipping agencies across located throughout Europe that will take your money and, on the whole, do a good job in finding the PR placed in the printed media.

But, and this is a big BUT, they all fail dismally when it comes to monitoring any press in highly specialised markets, "Engineering" - especially automation and space technology - in our particular case.

Now, we should not be too harsh on these clipping agencies because if you look at the business case for monitoring the Engineering press the numbers just don’t stake up! There are insufficient businesses within the engineering sector that could afford a pan-European press clipping service. Put simply, the cost of subscribing to all of the appropriate media and paying for native language readers to scan those same media would cost more than the revenue generated by the service

When it comes to identifying news content of the world’s biggest magazine, the WWW, the situation is even worse!

The “lazy” PR agency often relies on some form of “wired” news distribution service, which is suitable for high level business and IT announcements but fail the trade media.

The story may get picked up by the main web search engines but very rarely appears in the specialist media websites as a direct result of this type of distribution. To get stories onto the specialist media web sites you need to have a relationship with the editor and send the story personally, while making sure that it is relevant to readers of that specialist media web site.

Now, let’s assume you have followed this sound advice and the editor places the story on the website. Will Google or Yahoo find that story when conducting a web search – probably not! Most specialist media web sites are not identified as “official” news sources by Google and Yahoo, and as such the chances are that the precious story placed will have fallen off the bottom of the website when and if it is indexed.

So what is the solution?

Subscribe to the magazines and scan known websites regularly - not perfect but what in this life is?

Let's begin with a nice quote, ‘Forget the 99.99% you get right, it’s the .01% error that’ll bring a chopper down’.

When dealing with military, engineering, medical and industrial documents, the life of your company and your clients resides in the detail. Over a quarter of APT’s business comes from ‘damaged goods’ – i.e. companies whose product has entered the global market with wince-inducing poorly translated literature. We believe that every translation, from a caption to a catalogue, is an undertaking of trust.

The international arena of translated technical material is an ever evolving language medium, which means that using subject qualified experts is essential. But, if they are non-native translators, they will alienate the company’s target audience in that country’s marketplace.

"When your overseas client receives your product and opens your manual, he is holding your company’s ‘silent ambassador’ – so he’d better speak the language well.", Tim Francis, APT (Bristol).

As an international PR consultancy, BCM have encountered similar issues. For example, a former German speaking client provided regular "English" translations of highly technical press releases that were undertaken in-house as a cost saving excersise. The result was a German (non-native) translation that would have confused even the most clued-up specialist in their technology.

The unfortunate Account Manager had to use a combination of the original "Deutsche Pressemittielung" and the English version to achieve an adequate press release.

This press release would then have to be re-approved by the German engineers, to ensure that the facts were correct before finally distributing the press release.

Now, ask yourself how many hours that takes and compare it to the cost of a professional translation undertaken by your regular translation partner. The sums, the delays involved and the number of stages introduced are undesirable. More importantly, as Tim explained above, the quality and company image is at risk if the work is not completed satisfactorilly.

From a PR perspective, of course, a holistic view is essential. Why spend money and time building a reputation for a company as an international player in PR materials when their product brochures say "We about us" or have completely meaningless translations?