Technology

Reviewing Terminology Management Tools to Fortify Your Global Brand Potential

Gabriel Fairman

2 min

While we don’t want to overwhelm you, we do want you to be aware of and prepared for the complexities of the localization process. Some basic steps that you can take now will make a world of difference when it comes time to release your product around the world.

Read more about the range of planning steps as you approach globalization

One of those steps is to fortify your terminology management because your translation will be only as good as your company’s own grasp on the words. Terminology management tools can empower your localization team with centralized assets for greater clarity, consistency, and accountability—if you choose the right tool. But for even the best terminology tool to work well, you have to take the time to organize your own thinking around terminology.

How Should You Be Preparing for Terminology Management?

While, at first, it might seem like redundant busywork, one of the most important things you can do to set yourselves up for success with localization is to do a thorough analysis of your product and your brand to pull out keywords that are important. Before you get into the development of your linguistic assets or start using any terminology management tools, you need to be mobilizing your teams to make words a priority.

When you can build the foundation for this source of truth, your translators will actually have a leg to stand on.

It’s time to pull your branding team aside to generate lists of key words and phrases that are fundamental to what your company is doing now. It’s a common exercise for marketing campaigns, so it shouldn’t be entirely foreign. Likewise, visit your UI designer to gather a list of prominent words that make your product work and that make your product unique.

What are the calls to action your teams have identified? What are the exact words that are going to prompt someone to click on the critical button? Your developers have already thought about this at length. And these are valuable details as you’re lining up your resources for localization too.

You need all of your employees to be aligned with those words that truly represent your company culture, and you need everyone to be using those terms consistently.

What to Look for in Terminology Management Tools

That company soul-searching has to come first if any terminology tools are going to serve you faithfully. These tools will not be managing arbitrary details but the very color and flavor of your product.So, we’ll state the obvious: Having a reliable partner that can steer you in the right direction as you prepare for localization is everything.

As complicated as localization is, it’s not really that hard if you’re willing to take the time to make the important connections and build the relationships within your organization so everyone is committed to the same goal.But, apart from an experienced and trustworthy partner, what should you be looking for when you’re actually shopping for terminology management tools?

Opt for the Metadata to Fortify Your Translations

Real terminology management tools that are worth your time will manage more than just the words. The tools that are going to support your long-term projects, scale with your growing markets, and evolve with your product are those that also manage vital metadata.You can apply a critical eye to vendors’ options that typically fall somewhere along a hierarchy of features:

Some tools will manage the words and translations only—just what’s on the surface
Some tools will go beyond the translations to also manage definitions and parts of speech
Then, consider that there is a range of tools in between that offer some additional management features but not others
The ultimate terminology management tools will manage all of the following:
The words in translation
The parts of speech
The gender—because it assumes that other languages may need this distinguishing element
Usage examples so a translator will be able to view the project in context
Clear instructions when a term should be translated in a certain way or when a term should never be translated
An attached URL when visual references may help a linguist to better translate a term

You can see why those early steps to organize your terminology are so important when the right terminology management tool can provide so much essential support to linguists.

Look for Simple Management of Roles and Permissions

Because the treatment of words and translation is so fundamental to your product’s success, it matters who is involved in defining the parameters. Even an expert in localization can’t just drop in and determine which terms are most important and how those terms should be handled in translation.

Only someone who knows your product, your brand, your culture, and your goals inside and out can really draw the lines that will help to ensure your long-term success.You need to be able to proactively assign roles and permissions for everyone who will be operating within the system. You’ll define the role for content creators, for translators, for reviewers, for language managers, and for administrators. You need to thoughtfully identify who should be signing off on terms before they become an active part of your term bases and glossaries. The caliber of these assets will reflect the quality of your end translations.

Accept Nothing Less Than a Transparent Workflow

In order to maintain an agile workflow, each term needs to be able to move through the system independently even as those terms are tightly correlated within your centralized glossary architecture. Along with the roles defined above, your management tool should notify relevant stakeholders at specific junctures along a term’s life cycle. There is no reason to have to manually push these notifications when the system is robust enough to do so automatically.

Then, no one has to wait for assignments to drop.And the most sophisticated terminology management systems will be built on full transparency.

With your diligent planning and with this comprehensive system, you can hope to have fewer problems, but problems will still arise. You need to be able to track those problems to their roots in order to address them and get your localization workflow back on track.When a complaint comes in from a local user, for example, because a particular translation in Slovak comes off as offensive—with complete and transparent tracking, you can easily dig into the system to look at every single step in that translation process.

You can see the names of the people who had their hands on it, what they did, and when they did it. You can identify whether the reviewer let a poor translation slide or whether they caught it but the language manager overrode the objection.

It’s not exactly about finger-pointing, but it is about being able to work out the kinks effectively so they don’t become bigger dents in your operation.Just like every aspect of this terminology management discussion, it matters most when you can assess the details in context.

Why are people doing what they’re doing in your localization workflow? Do they know why? Why do certain words mean more for the success of your product in the source language and in translation? It’s a valuable opportunity you have to step back and assess what you already have to build on as you enter the localization realm.

Any terminology management tool and any localization partnership will be made better because of your company’s self-awareness and ownership of its fundamental building blocks.

‍Try out this list of must-haves on Bureau Works. We can fill you in on all of the planning best practices that might not yet be on your radar. We won’t dilute the localization process, but we will help to make it much more accessible.Contact our team to learn more about our terminology management tools and our new generation automated localization platform.

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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