Best Practices

6 Tricks Quality Translation Services Won’t Pull

The translation industry, like any other, has its good players and the not so good. ‍

Gabriel Fairman

2 min

The translation industry, like any other, has its good players and the not so good. ‍

Finding quality translation services can be crucial to your company’s success, and making a bad choice can cause a cascade of serious setbacks.When you first approach it, it may be a daunting experience to sort out the options. You may get the idea that localization vendors offer out-of-reach-complex services with processes that you may only dimly understand.

We can tell you, it doesn’t have to be that way. When you’re looking for a long-term partner for global expansion, here are some of the things you should avoid, as well as some of the more promising signs to look for.

6 Things You Won’t See from Quality Translation Services

Buyer beware! When you are ready to engage with a translation partner, you want the best service you can get without any unnecessary risks. While your translation needs are certainly unique, there are some practices that will suit no one. Here are seven red flags that should put you on alert.

1. Baby, it’s cold outside the black box

Your LSP shouldn’t treat the translation process as a mystery—by pulling your source language into an obscure pipeline and pushing your target language out the other end. Considering that you are entrusting your vital product content to a professional organization and paying for a service, it’s not unreasonable to ask about how your content will be handled, what the translators’ qualifications are, how they manage quality, and other operational details. Your concern is natural. Your language service provider (LSP) should be proud to meet you with transparency and accountability, demonstrating their industry expertise and creative solutions to your product and market challenges.There would be no reason to hide quality translation services.

2. Promising the impossible

Take stock of sales techniques. LSPs can invent bells and whistles to talk about during the RFP/deal-making process that sound impressive and mean nothing for your job. Ask hard questions. A quality translation provider is going to be proud of what they offer and willing to be transparent and stand behind their work. Be particularly suspicious of promises that sound too good to be true. If an LSP promises you too much and won’t say how they’re going to do it, it’s probably because you won’t like the answer. They’ll cut corners somewhere—they may use non-native speakers or machine translations with minimal edits. Or there may be inevitable delays down the road.Likewise, be wary if they’re setting unrealistic expectations about talent consistency to try to hook you. “We can promise the same team of translators and voice talent for the life of the project”—and other reassurances like that. Things happen—people move, get pregnant, change jobs, even die. These can be hard facts of life for an LSP. Your LSP cannot promise you that nothing will ever change. And as long as there is good quality management in place, linguists can change without a drop in quality. Voiceover talent, on the other hand, is not so easily replaced. Look for translation service providers that are willing to meet you honestly in reality. There are always challenges. The key is to acknowledge them and to work together to meet your goals in real circumstances.

3. Ripping you off

Transparency begins with pricing. You are in the market for translation, so you should be quoted a price for a translation—a specific and predictable sum per word for a high-quality translation. There are numerous ways to avoid this, however. You may be charged per word and then wind up paying a fee for a “verification step,” which means that the rate you pay is higher (maybe much higher) than the rate they quoted for “translation.”Another way an LSP might overcharge you is with service charges such as fees to download files or convert a PDF. These things cost practically nothing to carry out but could end up costing you beyond your expectation and your budget, especially when all the little extras add up with more and more target languages.

4. Offering you a translation that’s “good enough”

You share responsibility with the LSP for finding the right level of service for you. If you do not follow through on that responsibility, an LSP may end up making pivotal decisions to suit their needs. A less-than-trustworthy vendor may be willing to sign off on “acceptable quality,” but that’s not going to fuel your ambitious global tour. The problem is that you have to trust your vendor to make certain calls and to support certain quality management systems. Unless you speak all of the languages you’ll be translating into, you can’t be responsible for managing the translation quality services directly. You need to be able to vet your partner from the start and trust in their commitment and capacity to rise up to your goals.When your success depends on getting your message across to a new market, you don’t want a partner committed to anything less than exceptional translation quality because that will determine how far and how well you can take your product to foreign audiences. Challenge every potential vendor to show you how they regularly handle quality management for localization projects, how they build teams of linguists, how they support reliable in-country review.

5. Hoarding resources

In order to ensure consistency, efficiency, and high-quality translations, you really need strong terminology assets. Some translation vendors already have valuable systems in place to manage these assets; all of them should. But your task is not simply to find those LSPs that offer strong terminology assets to support linguists; your task is also to home in on the ones committed to handling your assets responsibly and to avoid those looking to take advantage of your assets. We’ll repeat the phrase “your assets” just one more time for effect.If an LSP isn’t on board with the idea that translation memories, term bases, and style guides are an extension of your content resources, there’s nothing to say that they will make them available for your review or turn them over to you when asked—making it much harder for you to leave them for a better vendor partnership later on. There’s also no guarantee, in this way, that the vendor will properly maintain these assets and keep them up to date—which is the only way to benefit from the consistency and efficiency the assets would provide.

6. Selling you underdeveloped technology

An LSP can try to sell you on their tech, distracting you from many of the other important discussions and red flags. If the reality is that their technology is not as well developed as the sales rep suggests, it will need extensive layers of customization. Once you’re tens of thousands of dollars and many months into this unnecessary development, there’s no turning back. In essence, this is just like building a unique system from scratch—and your own developers probably could have done that. And there’s no assurance that this system will be sustainable.It’s important that you get it right the first time and not waste your resources on empty promises. There arecutting-edge localization systems that are ready to go—platforms that can bring together all of your content and all of your stakeholders and continue to scale as you expand your reach. Look for evidence of a vendor’s current capacity to facilitate your intended workflow and to build integrations into an already-working system.

Knowing When a Translation Vendor Should Get the Green Flag

Honesty and quality should be basic expectations of a service provider, but you still have to look for them. To find quality translation services, you have to understand the way the LSP works and the way they charge for their services.Ask penetrating questions, and make your needs clear; it’s an essential part of partnership. Ask about how they take advantage of automation.

With a centralized, automated platform that is already operational, you can set up systems and integrations and then watch the progress of your content from beginning to end. That way, you can verify the quality of the service and understand clearly what you’re being charged for. As your business grows internationally, you’ll want to invest more in a transparent partnership like this because it’s on your side all the way.

‍The Bureau Works localization software provides a centralized platform for end-to-end automation of translation tasks with a high level of transparency. Our advanced technology and convenient CLI/API integration allow you to automate your workflow while preserving your grip of process and expense management.Contact our teamto find out more about how we can help you meet your translation and marketing goals.

Written by Luciana Passos

Luciana is Bureau Work’s COO. She is known as a gap bridger and a heart follower.

Collaborative translation is a powerful tool for your business if you’re looking to expand to new global markets. By coordinating a team of professionals who work together in real-time, you can quickly deliver high quality translations that resonate with local audiences.

But what if you don't know how to synchronize a large team's efforts? Or are you‌ struggling to find the right software for a well-coordinated translation process? Well, look no further! In this guide, you'll learn all the know-how's of collaborative translation to bring your brand to global audiences.

Overview

What is collaborative translation?
Why seamless translation collaboration is important
Best practices for collaborative translation and global market success

What is collaborative translation?

Collaborative translation is when multiple people simultaneously work together to translate content. A collaborative translation process often makes use of specialized tools and software to make sure the translation is quick, accurate, and consistent.

Example: Let's say you're a B2B SaaS company looking to translate your marketing materials into a new language to connect with potential clients abroad. Use collaborative translation to bring together translators, developers, and other specialists to translate content into many languages at once.

Your team can use a collaborative translation platform like Redokun to work on projects simultaneously. A coordinated workflow will make sure that your translations use the same terminology and style, improving the quality of the translated product for your target audiences.

Collaborative Translation vs. Crowdsourcing

People often confuse collaborative translation with crowdsourcing and think the two are the same. However, these approaches to translation are different.

Crowdsourcing is when a large group of people contributes translations, often through an open call or invitation by a company or author. Brands can turn to crowdsourcing, community translation, or volunteer translation when they are looking to reduce costs and accelerate the process, especially for large multi-language projects.

In crowdsourced translations, the contributors can be volunteer translators, subject matter experts, or just anonymous individuals online. In other words, you may not know who's worked on the translation and what their qualifications are. It makes crowdsourcing distinct from collaborative translation, where the team would be an established group of professionals you've selected

Why seamless translation collaboration is important

As a busy B2B/B2C marketing manager or project manager, you might ask yourself: Isn't the "divide and conquer" a better strategy when working on a translation or localization project? It seems logical that each project team member, including translators, designers, and editors, works on their tasks separately and step by step.

However, collaborative translation can help your team reap many benefits compared to a traditional approach to translation projects:

Reasons why seamless translation collaboration is important

Produce high-quality translations consistently. When your whole team works on a translation project simultaneously on one platform, it's easier to stay in context and keep track of the translation accuracy for every target language. On top of that, your team can conduct agile QA throughout the project cycle.
‍Faster turnaround times. By working together, your team can complete projects faster and more efficiently. Centralization saves a lot of time at every stage of translation. And since your team can work on more than one translation at a time, you can publish your translated content in several new markets at once.
‍Reduced costs. You get to improve efficiency while working with a smaller team of translators. The smaller and more coordinated the team, the less the risk of costly translation errors. It means reduced translation costs and better project budget compliance.
‍Increased flexibility. Collaborative translation allows your team to produce translations into many languages at once and easily make changes to any project document. You can conveniently engage in a feedback loop and guarantee a continuous localization process.
‍Better communication. Collaborative translation effectively brings all members of your localization team together on one platform. It helps you make sure that everyone is working toward the same goals ‌and simplifies overall localization management.

Six best practices for collaborative translation and global market success

To be great at collaborative translation, you need to approach it strategically. Even if you've never used this approach before, you can follow the six steps below to build an efficient collaborative translation workflow. And if you're already familiar with this method, these practices will help you improve the way you collaborate on any translation projects.

Six best practices for collaborative translation for your global business success

1. Work out a detailed project plan

Before you start working on translations together, you need a clear-cut project plan. You should first identify the following items.

Project timeline: Define crucial deadlines, project milestones, and the overall project duration.
Translation volume and key deliverables: Calculate the general word count, and determine the workload for every language pair if you translate into multiple languages.
Project budget: Keep in mind possible added and hidden translation costs.
Project team: Define what kind of specialists you need: translators, editors, proofreaders, etc. Will you need to find external translators? Consider all your HR needs in advance.
Your approach to the translation process: How much do you want to rely on machine translation? At what point will you edit translated strings? Answer all these questions before you go on.
Quality assurance protocol: Establish an efficient QA procedure for all the language pairs you're working on.

It may sound like a handful but the more detailed the plan, the more streamlined the translations will be down the road. Besides, you can already use Redokun to boost this stage of the localization process!

Redokun is a translation management system you can use to automate, coordinate, and optimize your translation processes from content creation to publication.

Redokun simplifies your project planning. In particular, you can use the tool to:

Monitor your ongoing translations easily. Keep track of all of your translation files and projects across multiple languages in one space, and check their progress at a glance.

Meet deadlines with digest emails. Redokun will send you daily or weekly email digests to update you on the progress of translations. From there, you can initiate one-click reminders to your translators who are potentially falling behind schedule.
Making budget planning easier. Redokun has a transparent, scalable pricing structure that will cover exactly the volume of work your project needs.

Redokun is an easy-to-use tool that requires no onboarding. Your team can start using all the system’s features right away. During your project planning stage, you won’t need to factor in a lengthy training period to introduce team members to the tool.

2. Divide tasks and assign responsibilities the smart way

Good collaboration is impossible without a well-planned distribution and organization of roles and tasks. Ensure that every team member is on the same page and understands their respective responsibilities.

For example, the project managers should divide ‌translation tasks among translation team members according to their language proficiency, area of expertise, or subject matter knowledge.

On Redokun, you can invite translators to work on different language pairs and content types depending on their skills. All you need to do is enter the translator's email. The software will send them an email invitation and let you know once they've started translating the file.
You can also invite several translators to work on one document.

To maximize the efficiency of project management and task division, establish a clear structure of your workflow. Make sure all your pages, files, and folders are well organized and team members know where to find necessary resources for their respective tasks. A centralized, cloud-based storage for all your documents is a must.

Redokun is a cloud-based software that makes file management easy. You can create folders and customize permission settings for multiple users for better organization. No more need to look for spreadsheets and lost documents scattered around different digital locations.
Don't forget to make the most of the Reporting Dashboard. It shows you the status of the translation project and helps you see how users distribute tasks (for example, what methods they use to translate different content segments).

Redokun Dashboard with translation statistics

3. Enhance the collaborative translation process with clear communication

It's important to have open communication channels among all team members in your translation project, including internal and external translators. For a successful collaboration effort, you need a shared communication space to:

Conduct regular check-ins.
Discuss translation options and other aspects of the working process.
Update and adjust requirements and guidelines.
Maintain feedback loops.

It's up to you to choose between email, messengers, or tools like Google Drive or Slack to keep your collboarative operations flowing. However, using multiple channels for different aspects of the project can get messy. It's harder to manage your team and make sure all collaborators are up to date on the ongoing translation tasks.

You can avoid these potential problems by centralizing all your communications and project management. With translation software like Redokun, you can manage, translate, communicate, and collaborate — all in one place.

Translate content in context. Your translators or editors can use page previews in Web Editor to understand the context of the text while working on it.
Work together in real-time. Use Redokun as a full-scale collaborative translation platform. It enables real-time cooperation among your team members, improving efficiency and reducing communication errors.
Use comments, mentions, and notifications to exchange feedback quickly. Redokun's Web Editor is a convenient place to stay in touch and discuss your translation progress every step of the way.

Create a hybrid workflow. Work with your in-house teams or external translators to suit different localization project formats and scalability needs.

4. Use machine translation and translation memory tools

Computer-assisted translation tools are a great addition to human translation. Machine translation (MT) helps your collaborators speed up the localization process by automating translation. Of course, it doesn't have the quality of a human professional translation — it’s more like a helping hand that's always there to facilitate the translation of complex phrases or new terms.

Redokun is integrated with two Machine Translation tools: Google Translate and DeepL. Translation suggestions by these two tools pop up right below where the translator should key in the translation, as shown here.

To enhance collaboration even further, consider using translation memory tools. They ensure consistency and save translation software users a lot of time.

Translation memory (TM) is a translation technology that stores previously translated sentences or phrases as segments and creates a unique database for your localization projects. You can reuse your translation to increase efficiency and consistency in ongoing and future translations.

With Redokun as your collaborative translation platform, you can leverage TM to:

Consistently translate any repeated word, phrase, or sentence across different language pairs and documents. It's especially important for translating technical terms, marketing slogans, CTAs, and other catchphrases. Translation memory helps you stay consistent in your marketing messaging.
Pre-translate your entire documents. Combine TM matches from your previous translations with Machine Translation to get a fully pre-translated document even before your team gets to work.
Manage your translation memory database. Import and customize your TM database to further improve translation quality and consistency.

”The speed of translation is quite impressive in that it doesn’t take [much time], maybe a couple of minutes when you translate from English to eight markets. I think that’s what I’m most impressed by.”

Read more about how Kenni and the marketing team at Rockfon increased their translation productivity by 70% using translation memories and other Redokun features here.

5. Use glossaries and style guides

Glossaries and style guides are valuable resources your team can use for reliable reference.

A glossary is a list of terms and their corresponding translations that are specific to a company or industry.

A style guide outlines the preferred tone, voice, and style for a company's marketing materials across markets and languages.

Your collaborators can refer to these resources when they’re not sure about a translation. For example is when they're deciding how to translate a company abbreviation, whether to the Oxford comma, or choosing the right tone to address customers, etc. No more ambiguity about linguistic, stylistic, and cultural aspects of your translations.

Use Redokun's glossary feature to create a glossary and style guide that outlines rules for spelling, grammar, punctuation, terminology, and tone specific to your project.

6. Continuously review and revise

A key benefit of a collaborative translation platform is the ability to review and revise translations in an agile and efficient manner. By involving multiple specialists in the process of editing and QA, you can guarantee accuracy and consistency in the translated content at every stage of the project.

To implement effective review and revision procedures in your collaborative translation projects, it is important to:

Plan for review and revision in advance. Identify who will be responsible, set the timeline, and use specific tools.
Consider involving in-country reviewers who are familiar with the local market and culture to ensure that the translations are accurate and appropriate for the target audience.
Perform regular QA checks. They should include consistency in terminology and formatting, and verify that the translations are free from grammatical errors and typos.

Pro-tip: Ever experienced the headache of having to update a translation that’s already 70% done when there is a last-minute change to the source document?

With Redokun’s revision feature, you don’t have to spend hours poring over Excel sheets and comparing files to spot the places where new words have been added or sentences have been changed. Just upload the latest document version and the system will identify new text that needs translating — saving your team’s time and effort while keeping previous translations intact.

Summary

Collaborative translation is an excellent approach if you want to improve the consistency of your translations, reduce costs, and establish a strong presence in global markets.

The key to seamless collaboration is a combination of careful planning, role distribution, agile QA, and smart use of translation software.

Make Redokun part of your collaborative translation efforts and enhance the pace of your global business growth‌. Start your 14-day free trial today and benefit from a quicker and more streamlined translation workflow.

Till next time,

Anastasia

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