Best Practices

Secure Localization Translation Jobs for Savvy Translators

Freelance translators deal with a lot. Some project managers assign jobs based on favoritism and familiarity. Sometimes, it’s the case that you get work only if you’re the one responding to their emails the fastest.
Gabriel Fairman
2 min

Freelance translators deal with a lot. Some project managers assign jobs based on favoritism and familiarity. Sometimes, it’s the case that you get work only if you’re the one responding to their emails the fastest.

You end up wasting time on menial tasks that divert you from the linguistic work you take pride in. Worst of all, you are constantly squeezed into lowering your rates (again, again, and again).

How do you mitigate these challenges?Some translators ditch the freelance path altogether. They resolve to look for jobs with end clients because they’re more likely to find job security.

But they give up all the flexibility and autonomy that so many translators grow to appreciate. Sometimes, it feels like you’re stuck between starving as a freelancer and slaving as a corporate drone.The best localization translation jobs give you a sustainable middle ground between these two extremes.

You get all the flexibility of freelancing with many of the benefits of a corporate gig while maintaining your agency as a qualified language professional. When you work for companies like Bureau Works, you’re not just another cog in a massive LSP’s machine. You’re a valuable partner in the pursuit of high-quality localization.

Choose Translation Jobs That Are Actually Worth Your Time

We know good translation jobs are hard to come by. Sometimes, you feel like you have to settle for dead-end, low-paying contract work because it’s the only way to pay the bills. But these jobs are problematic in more ways than one. In most cases, they don’t even provide the basic foundations a translator needs in order to be successful.To be worth your consideration, a company should at least offer the following:

  • Flexible scheduling. What’s the point of freelancing if you can’t actually choose your own schedule? At Bureau Works, we have plenty of clients and hundreds of projects coming through our platform every single day. We have enough work for translators to fill 10 hours or 60 hours per week, completely at their discretion.
  • Simple evaluation. Most LSPs test your skills with complicated tasks that take a lot of time to complete. But not every test is like that. Ours is quite simple. If you’re competent as a translator, you’ll get approved quickly and move into the BWX system. There, you’ll prove your skills through completing real projects for real pay.
  • Strong translation tools. Fully functioning CAT tools should be a standard expectation for any job, but sometimes these tools are your responsibility, at your expense. Not only does Bureau Works offer cutting-edge CAT tools to our translators at no cost, but we also offer advanced terminology management technology built into our localization platform. This places translators in the driver’s seat for continual content improvement and sets you up for growing success with each client.
  • Freedom from time-wasting tasks. Stop wasting time on invoicing, emailing, and engineering tasks. Good localization software completes these actions automatically so you can focus on linguistics and minimize the distractions.
  • Really interesting projects. We know that translations are more successful when you’re actually interested in the subject matter. If you like translating for popular consumer brands, powerful ecommerce clients, and booming tech startups, seek out localization companies that have that kind of reach.

The majority of translation jobs on the market don’t provide these basic requirements—but we consider them completely foundational for success. Don’t take these things for granted in your job search. You deserve to work for a company that sets you up for success and operates in your best interest.You’ll know an opportunity is worth your time when the company offers these benefits as a baseline guarantee. Start here, and then expect even more.

The Best Localization Translation Jobs on the Market

If you were to create the perfect localization translation job, what would you do first?When we launched Bureau Works, we wanted to create a translation ecosystem that was more data-driven—and more human-friendly. Our team wove these dual concerns into a powerful localization platform that helps translators be more successful both creatively and financially.Here’s how that impacts our translator community:

We judge translators based on merit and data.

At most LSPs, your workload depends entirely on the personal preference of a project manager—and they tend to play favorites. There’s no objectivity and limited opportunity. We broke this cycle by instituting a meritocracy within the BWX system.With Bureau Works, everything is algorithm-based.

For example, as you complete projects in our platform, you’re automatically assigned a Quality Index score based on the amount of revision your work requires. Ideally, you’d be trying to achieve a quality score below 15%—meaning only one out of seven strings or sentences requires editing by a reviewer.

Our software automatically assigns translation jobs based on this score, removing favoritism completely from the equation.Because this system naturally favors experience, we’ve deliberately left the backdoor open for new translators. Our software assigns a combination of proven translators and new translators for every single project. We make sure opportunities are always available in your personal queue, no matter how long you’ve been working with us.

We protect translators during the reviewing process.

Assigning work based on hard data automatically makes the translation process more egalitarian. But we know as well as you do that reviewers are entirely subjective. You could easily end up with a reviewer who just doesn’t like your style and leaves you a Quality Index of 40%. Don’t worry. We’ve thought of that.Bureau Works protects our translators from over-editing through several measures:

  • We provide new translators with a constant mix of reviewers and content types so you can test your skills in a variety of contexts.
  • Over time, our algorithm observes which reviewers and content types you’ve proven to be successful with and offers you more of those jobs.
  • We require reviewers to categorize and justify each revision request, which effectively disincentivizes over-editing.
  • Our platform is built on transparency. If you don’t agree with the feedback you’ve been given, there is a simple way for you to elevate an arbitration.
  • Everyone in the localization process is held accountable by final client evaluation—because they can see every change that’s happened in-platform up to the final product.

We empower translators to set their own rates.

All over the world, translators are facing a financial crisis. LSPs are notorious for pushing translators to lower their rates in order to raise profit margins. This leaves many translators unable to support themselves and their families in this line of work. The politics don’t favor the talent and the value of the work.

It’s deeply unjust.Companies should not be taking home the lion’s share of the profit on every project they complete. We need to honor the human beings who are doing the creative work of localization and provide them with adequate compensation according to their skills and abilities.

At Bureau Works, we empower all of our translators to set their own rates. We will never nickel and dime you or ask you to lower your per-word price. We leave it up to you to be savvy enough to competitively price your work—and our algorithm assigns projects objectively according to client budgetary needs.

Every translator has the right to be paid fairly for the highly specialized skill of translation. Ditch your low-paying contract jobs and come to work for a company that values your authority, dedication, and work ethic. You’ll be rewarded in more ways than one.

Are You a Good Fit for Bureau Works?

Bureau Works is always looking to hire experienced translators who are self-motivated and driven to create high-quality content in a fast-paced world. We believe good translations result from a mutually beneficial relationship between translator and employer.

That’s why we provide the best localization translation jobs in the industry—and why our work definitely isn’t cut out for everyone.To be a good fit as a Bureau Works translator, you need to be okay with radical transparency. Are you willing to give (and receive) transparent feedback?

We rely on open collaboration with translators, reviewers, and clients to produce the highest-quality final result possible. There’s nowhere to hide in the Bureau Works system. On the other hand, that means you’ve got a real opportunity to shine on every single project you complete.We also expect our translators to move quickly and stay connected.

We aren’t going to call you personally to ask if you want to take on a project next week.

At Bureau Works, localization moves quickly. Translators who succeed with us are active on the platform, they respond to communication threads, and they participate in our fast-paced digital dynamic. You can’t be passive. If you’re going to work with us, you need to be a passionate participant in our ecosystem.

Think you have what it takes to be part of the Bureau Works team? We’re always welcoming new freelance translators into our ranks. Whether you plan to work part-time or build a full-scale career, BWX offers the chance to apply your skills in a challenging and rewarding environment.Join our team and experience the translation ecosystem we designed specifically for you.

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

  1. What is collaborative translation?
  2. Why seamless translation collaboration is important
  3. 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.
Redokun Document Detail Page
  • 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.
How to invite translators to Redokun

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.
Collaboration feature in Redokun
  • 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.
Redokun glossary feature preview

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

Gabriel Fairman
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