How to Choose a Trustworthy Language Service Provider
Language service providers (LSPs) are notorious for being untrustworthy. Every couple of years, a localization manager will outsource localization to another service, hoping this one will be better than the last.
Gabriel Fairman
2 min
Language service providers (LSPs) are notorious for being untrustworthy. Every couple of years, a localization manager will outsource localization to another service, hoping this one will be better than the last. Maybe the last LSP charged your company thousands in hidden platform fees.
Maybe they presented translations that were on point in the beginning but slowly spiraled into unacceptable territory. Heaven knows you’ve been burned before.If your history with LSPs reads like a bad breakup, it’s time to take appropriate steps to make sure your next partnership is a good one. You need a long-term relationship that’s based on trust, accountability, and transparency.
When you finally have a good language service provider on your side, you’ll realize the joy of interacting with a vendor who actually provides value to you and your company. We want that for you.Let’s examine how to choose a language service provider. Start looking for that unicorn relationship at the beginning of the sales cycle.
You can learn almost everything you need to know about an LSP by examining their pricing structure—which you should absolutely do before signing a contract. By following these four steps, you’ll be able to sidestep the standard LSP’s pricing tricks and home in on partners who are actually worth your time.
4 Steps for How to Choose the Right Language Service Provider
Step 1: Consider the per-word rate
When you’re looking to hire a localization service, the first thing you should consider is their per-word rate. But be warned—this has become one of the most common bait-and-switch mechanisms in our industry. You can expect to see each of the big-box LSPs on your list advertising a low per-word rate.Sounds great, right?The problem is, dishonest companies will lure you in with a cheap rate and then tack on extra, unexpected, perhaps hidden fees. Over the course of your engagement, you’ll end up paying more than if you had signed with a competitor with a higher price per word. Start by looking for a middle-of-the-road per-word rate. That way you’ll have a better chance at setting an accurate budget for your total localization costs. And be ready to look beyond this pricing indicator for the whole picture.
Step 2: Sweat the small stuff
Next, take a magnifying glass to the fine print and seek out all of those hidden costs that an LSP might add onto your bill. Look for policies on:
Translation memory (TM). How much does this company charge for 100% matches? Even though perfect matches sourced from the TM take practically no work from the translator, many LSPs will still take this opportunity to drain a few more cents out of you.
File downloads. If you’re not working with a localization platform that’s fully integrated with your CMS, how much are they going to charge you for downloading files? Some LSPs will charge anywhere from $2.00 to $5.00 per page for a PDF downloaded from their repository. Yes, this is utterly absurd.
Voiceovers. Many LSPs challenge their clients to find a lower voiceover price than the one they’re offering—but are they including all the additional fees? Line items like engineering costs, studio time, director fees, and casting calls can add up fast.
Most dishonest LSPs get away with nickeling and diming their clients. Make sure you’re paying attention to the small details before you sign a contract because they could reveal questionable business practices that end up costing you thousands.
Step 3: Don’t fall for tiered platform pricing
Tiered pricing is another gimmick of many localization technology providers. “As long as you stay within X number of words, you’ll receive our lowest rate!” Buyer beware. This is the biggest complaint clients have against some of the major big-box LSPs on the market today. Localization platform technology may seem relatively well priced in the beginning, but as soon as you process more than your allotted total words of translation, the LSP could tack on fees—fees that may be astonishingly high because you’ve reached the next-tier-up cost by using the tech too much.Don’t listen to their illegitimate justifications of “server space” and “volume of work.” Tiered pricing is designed so that LSPs can leech off of clients who become successful. Look for a partner that lets you pay on a linear scale—or better yet, a partner that charges a flat fee for unlimited use and unlimited users. That way you can grow your enterprise as big as the market allows without being penalized.
Step 4: Ask the hard questions
In the end, it’s not enough to get representative line items from any LSP you’re thinking about hiring. You need to ask detailed questions that force prospective vendors to give an accurate estimate of the total cost of a real project. Put a real-life scenario before each of your vendors by detailing a project (complete with number of files and integrations) and ask what they plan to charge in exact dollar amounts. Then, take some time to consider the internal costs of building a localization strategy around this company.
Based on the tech they offer, how much time and effort will your staff have to put into managing localization? Use that estimate and the LSP’s projections to create a total cost number, which you can then use to compare vendors.This is the only way to know for sure how much localization will cost your company. It’s also the best way to identify which language service providers are doing right by their clients. You should absolutely complete this step before signing a contract of any kind—and if a vendor makes it hard for you to learn exact costs for your project, take your business elsewhere.
At Bureau Works, we believe in tearing down the curtain and revealing hard truths about the language services industry. With so much at stake, it’s really hard to know how to choose a trustworthy language service provider. We built our localization platform on radical transparency, which ultimately helps our clients save money and reach global audiences faster with higher quality content.Contact our team to start localizing with a language service provider you can trust.
Written by Luciana Passos
Luciana is Bureau Works 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:
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.
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 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 pairsand 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).
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.