Best Practices

Bureau Works is SOC 2 Compliant

We are thrilled to inform you that Bureau Works recently received the SOC 2 Compliance certificate. This means that our company is capable of managing and securing our clients’ data and privileged information.
Rodrigo Demetrio
2 min

We are thrilled to inform you that Bureau Works recently received the SOC 2 Compliance certificate. This means that our company is capable of managing and securing our clients’ data and privileged information. Guaranteeing data security is the best way a company can make sure their data is well handled. It means that a business is less likely to suffer from data theft, hack attacks or information mishandling. On top of that, there are national laws to ensure that such information is looked after by service providers. That is why many of them are preoccupied with ensuring companies that their data is secure. In this light, many methods are available in the market to ensure such security. The SOC 2 Compliance is one of the most effective ones. Have you heard about it before? Keep reading our text to understand why it is so important to have this certificate!

What is SOC 2 compliance?

The SOC 2 Compliance is a procedure created by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) to audition companies. The goal here is to protect the interests of the company at the same time it secures its data.The SOC 2 process is an audition technique that certificates the company’s security and availability. It is a reassuring method that business uses to ensure data security to its clients, as this information is handled in a controlled environment.

Why is SOC 2 compliance important?

Many people do not know, but Google can use your information however it wants if you use one of their services. It’s serious - that is even on Google Translation’s terms and agreements. Therefore, when we talk about producing content and translating, it is really important to make business with a company that takes data protection into account. Thus, ensuring it will not be used in a malicious way or sold to competitors. Bureau Works, por instance, has strict privacy and confidentiality clauses. Those are under our SOC 2 Type 2 Governance and ensures our clients that your content and data will remain private throughout its life.Having their information hacked is a big problem for companies and clients involved. First, because there are legal parameters that a company must follow in order to ensure the confidentiality of its clients and services. Secondly, there is a moral component of data security. Would you trust in a company that had data security problems?  Most companies would say “no” to this question. Nowadays, data security is getting a bigger and bigger role inside businesses.

The SOC 2 compliance is a procedural method that ensures the auditioning of companies and data collected. Thus, having this certificate means that the company is capable of properly handling the valuable information about its clients. That is the reason why we are proud to inform our clients we are part of the selected group given this certificate.

This kind of certification is given by auditors not related to the firm after a careful review of the company’s compliance system. As a consequence, it is viewed as an impartial method of evaluation - which brings even more credibility to the companies that have the certificate. Receiving such certificates is a sign that the company develops important procedures in order to protect its clients data, using encryption, firewalls and other tools to ensure it. This guarantees that the information is free from unauthorized or suspicious activities. SOC 2 certificated companies send out alerts every time there is exposure or modification of data, control or configurations. In addition to that, file transfer activities and privileged filesystem, account or login access have also alarms set up.Unlike other types of data security methods, SOC 2 compliance reports and auditions are customized for each company’s evaluation. Therefore, it can provide relevant information on how each one of them takes care of its data. The SOC 2 Certification takes five trust principles into account.

Privacy

The first component of the SOC 2 certification is privacy. In other words, this is the area responsible for auditioning the system’s collection, usage and disclosure of personal information. These must be done in accordance with the organization’s privacy notice. Furthermore, the organization's privacy notice must use criteria determined by the American Institute of CPAs’ Generally Accepted Privacy Principles (GAPP).  In this item, auditors measure the authentication methods of the business, as well as access control and encryption of data.

Confidentiality

As the name suggests, confidentiality focuses on data that are labeled as confidential. Those are information that are restricted to a selected group. Encryption is also measured in the confidentiality trust principle, as it is a way to protect data during transmission. Here, the Network and applications parallels are also measured to ensure that the company can keep private the information of third parties. Rigorous access controls must also be present in order to ensure confidentiality in the SOC 2 certificate’s standards.

Processing Integrity

Processing integrity is the principle that handles quality assurance and if the company is able to achieve what they propose to the clients. In order for this to happen, the data processing must be done in an authorized, complete and timely manner. The processing integrity evaluation is done through the monitoring of the company’s processes. It is important to highlight that this aspect of the SOC 2 certificate does not measure only data integrity, but also how the company monitors its data processing and quality assurance methods.

Availability

The availability trust principle auditions a company’s performance, disaster recovery and security incident handling. This is the part responsible for checking the accessibility of a system or service as stipulated by a contract or SLA (Service Level Agreement). “Availability” does not access system usability or functionality. Rather than that, it revolves around security-related requirements that can affect the business’ availability. In this sense, site failover is also accessed in this item.

Security

Finally, the security principle of the SOC 2 certificate refers to how the company protects itself from unauthorized access. Therefore, preventing data security problems that can lead to the leakage of important information. It takes into account two-factor authentication methods, network firewalls and intrusion detection. Furthermore, companies that are given the SOC 2 certificate show that they are dedicated to keeping their clients’ information private. As the evaluation to receive this certificate is done by outside auditors, the quality of the services provided are unquestionable. Bureau Works is committed to data security. That is why we are proud to inform you that we recently received the SOC 2 certificate. Thus, ensuring our company is capable of handling our clients' information in a secure and responsible manner.

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

Rodrigo Demetrio
Steering the marketing ship at Bureau Works with 17+ years of MarTech under my belt, I transform mere ideas into tangible realities. Passionate about languages and their power to build bridges, let's build a new one?
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