Best Practices

The Benefits of an AI-Powered Translation Management System

Lucky Eze

28 min

Businesses and organizations are expanding their reach across borders, engaging with diverse audiences in different languages. The need for efficient translation management systems has become paramount to bridging the language gap and ensuring effective communication. A Translation Management System, abbreviated as TMS, is a specialized software system created to streamline and automate language translation procedures. Enter the AI-powered Translation Management System (TMS), a revolutionary technology that leverages the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to streamline and enhance the translation process. Bureau Works is an instance of a leading AI-powered TMS (Translation Management System). It operates through the cloud and offers remarkable levels of adaptability in engagement models and a wide range of use cases, harnessing state-of-the-art Generative AI technology. With machine translation, neural machine translation, and AI translation at its core, an AI-powered TMS offers numerous benefits, from improved translation quality and increased efficiency to cost-effectiveness and simplified workflow. This article will explore the transformative advantages of an AI-powered TMS and how it can revolutionize how businesses localize content for their target language markets.

The Benefits of an Artificial Intelligent-Powered TMS

By harnessing the power of AI, these advanced TMS solutions take translation and localization to new heights, providing businesses with improved accuracy, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. In this article, we will explore how machine translation, neural machine translation, and AI translation contribute to the benefits of an AI-powered TMS and why businesses must adopt such cutting-edge technology.

Enhanced Machine Translation Capabilities

Machine translation has evolved significantly over time, thanks to continuous advancements in AI technology. An AI-powered (TMS) is a type of Translation Management System that incorporates sophisticated machine translation algorithms, revolutionizing the translation process. By integrating machine translation into a TMS, businesses can reap numerous benefits, such as faster translations, increased productivity, and reduced costs. The system can swiftly process large volumes of text, making it exceptionally suitable for organizations with substantial translation requirements.

Neural Machine Translation for Improved Accuracy

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) represents a machine translation subfield that harnesses artificial neural networks' power to generate highly accurate translations. In contrast to traditional statistical methods, NMT models possess a deeper understanding of context, leading to translations of superior quality. By integrating NMT capabilities into an AI-powered TMS, businesses can ensure that their translated content is linguistically and culturally precise, thereby enhancing the overall quality of their localized materials.

Efficient Handling of Multiple Target Languages

An AI-powered TMS offers a significant advantage in its ability to handle multiple target languages seamlessly. In today's globalized world, businesses often require translations into numerous languages to expand their reach. An AI-powered TMS efficiently manages this demand, enabling companies to effectively enter new markets and cater to a diverse customer base. This versatility empowers organizations to reach a broader audience while maintaining consistency and quality across all their translated content. By leveraging an AI-powered TMS, businesses can confidently scale their operations internationally while delivering localized experiences that resonate with their global customers.

Utilizing Google Translate and Other Translation Software

Google Translate is a famous example of automatic translation software that utilizes machine translation techniques. An AI-powered TMS can integrate with such translation software, providing businesses with additional language resources and options. By combining the power of Google Translate and other translation software with an AI-powered TMS, companies can access a vast pool of language data and achieve more accurate and comprehensive translations.

Seamless Integration with Machine Translation Cloud Services

An AI-powered TMS can leverage machine translation cloud services, allowing businesses to tap into powerful translation resources in real-time. These cloud services provide access to vast databases of multilingual content, enabling the TMS to learn and improve translations continuously. An excellent platform will seamlessly integrate with other company software assets, such as content management systems, knowledge management systems, and reporting platforms. This enables a smooth and effortless transition of data from one space to another. By integrating machine translation cloud services into their workflow, businesses can ensure that their translations are always up-to-date, reflecting the latest language usage and terminology.

Streamlined Translation Workflow

An AI-powered TMS optimizes the translation workflow by automating various manual tasks. It can intelligently allocate translation jobs, manage translation memories, and maintain consistency across multiple projects. With the help of AI, repetitive translation tasks can be handled swiftly and accurately, freeing up valuable time for linguists and enabling them to focus on more complex translation challenges. The result is increased efficiency and productivity for the entire translation process. Through the use of a reliable Ai-powered translation management system, companies can meticulously oversee the entire content translation and localization process, from its initiation to the final stages.

Continuous Learning and Improvement

AI-powered Translation Management System (TMS) solutions are designed to continually learn and improve based on various input sources, including user feedback and linguistic data. These systems can adapt and enhance their translation capabilities over time by leveraging machine learning algorithms. As more translations are processed through the TMS, the AI algorithms gain a deeper understanding of language patterns, nuances, and industry-specific terminology. This continuous learning process empowers the TMS to refine its translation output, improving accuracy and quality. Ultimately, businesses benefit from receiving consistently high-quality translations as the AI-powered TMS continuously evolves and learns from its experiences.

Enhanced Quality Control

An AI-powered TMS goes beyond mere translation by incorporating advanced quality control mechanisms. These mechanisms enable the system to detect potential translation errors and inconsistencies, ensuring the final output's accuracy and consistency. For example, the TMS can identify mistranslations, grammatical errors, or inconsistencies in terminology usage. By flagging these issues, the system allows linguists or human reviewers to review and correct any inaccuracies before the translations are finalized. This meticulous quality control process guarantees that businesses can confidently deliver localized content of the highest quality to their target audience, eliminating the risk of inaccurate or confusing translations. With the AI-powered TMS as an integral part of their localization workflow, businesses can maintain a high-quality standard and achieve effective communication across different languages.

Cost Savings

By utilizing an AI-powered TMS, businesses can achieve significant cost savings in their translation efforts. Traditional translation methods often require extensive manual work, which can be time-consuming and costly. However, with an AI-powered TMS automating various translation tasks, businesses can reduce reliance on human translators for routine translations. This reduces translation costs and allows organizations to allocate their resources more effectively.

Increased Scalability

As businesses expand and grow, their translation needs also increase. In the grand journey of expansion, the worst nightmare is a faltering system when your company takes flight. Long-term goals are as crucial as immediate achievements. Always consider your future plans when committing to a TMS. Let it be the cornerstone of your dreams. Choose wisely, and your heart's desires will sync with progress. An AI-powered TMS offers scalability to accommodate the growing demands of translation projects. With its ability to handle large volumes of text and multiple target languages simultaneously, businesses can seamlessly scale their translation processes without sacrificing quality or efficiency. This scalability ensures that the TMS can keep up with the evolving translation requirements of companies as they expand globally.

Data Security

An AI-powered TMS prioritizes data security, ensuring sensitive information remains protected throughout translation. It employs robust encryption methods and secure data storage to safeguard confidential data. Additionally, by utilizing on-premises or private cloud solutions, businesses have greater control over their data, reducing the risk of unauthorized access or data breaches.

Customizability

Every business has unique translation requirements and preferences. An AI-powered TMS offers customizability options to tailor the translation workflow to specific business needs. From defining translation priorities to establishing language style guidelines, businesses can customize the TMS to align with their brand voice and maintain consistency across all translated content. This level of customization empowers businesses to have greater control over their translation processes and ensures that their localized content reflects their brand accurately.

Best Practices to Utilize AI-Powered Translation Management System for a Better Translation Experience

By following these guidelines, businesses can leverage the power of AI, machine translation, and other advanced features to ensure accurate, efficient, and high-quality translations. In this article, we will explore the role of human translators, the importance of translation services, the use of translation tools and memory, and the integration of text and speech translation for a seamless translation workflow.

Collaboration between AI and Human Translators

While an AI-powered TMS automates various aspects of the translation process, human translators play a crucial role in ensuring translation quality and cultural nuances. Collaborating with AI, human translators can focus on more complex linguistic tasks, such as transcreation, localization, and adapting content to specific target markets. By combining human translators' expertise with AI's efficiency, businesses can achieve accurate translations that resonate with their target audience.

Utilizing Professional Translation Services

Partnering with professional translation services can provide several advantages for organizations with a high volume of translation needs. These services offer access to skilled translators who specialize in different industries and language pairs. By integrating professional translation services with an AI-powered TMS, businesses can ensure that their translations meet the highest standards of accuracy and quality while also benefiting from the efficiency and cost savings provided by AI technology.

Harnessing the Power of Translation Tools

An AI-powered TMS often uses various translation tools that enhance productivity and accuracy. These tools include terminology management systems, glossaries, spell-checkers, and quality assurance features. By effectively using these tools, businesses can ensure consistency in terminology, reduce errors, and streamline the translation process. Incorporating these tools into the workflow of an AI-powered TMS leads to improved efficiency and helps maintain brand consistency across translated content.

Leveraging Translation Memory

Translation memory is a powerful feature of an AI-powered TMS that stores previously translated segments and sentences for future use. By leveraging translation memory, businesses can achieve translation consistency, improve productivity, and reduce costs. When translating similar content, the TMS can automatically suggest previously translated segments, saving time for translators and maintaining consistency across projects. Regularly updating and refining the translation memory ensures the system continually learns and improves.

Integration of Text and Speech Translation

As communication channels expand, businesses increasingly require text and speech translation capabilities. An AI-powered TMS can integrate text and speech translation services, enabling companies to reach a broader audience across various mediums. By offering comprehensive translation solutions that include both written and spoken language, businesses can effectively cater to diverse communication needs and engage with audiences in a more personalized and accessible manner. Integrating Google Neural Machine Translation, a state-of-the-art neural machine translation system, can further enhance the accuracy and fluency of speech translation capabilities.

Continuous Training and Evaluation

To ensure the optimal performance of an AI-powered TMS, it is essential to provide continuous training and evaluation. The system needs to adapt and learn as new language patterns and industry-specific terminology emerge. By periodically updating the AI algorithms and providing further training data, businesses can improve the accuracy and effectiveness of the translations. Regular evaluation of the system's performance allows for fine-tuning and identifying areas for improvement, ensuring that the AI-powered TMS remains at the forefront of translation technology.

Quality Assurance and Review Processes

While an AI-powered TMS can automate many aspects of the translation process, quality assurance and review by human experts are still critical. Establishing robust quality assurance processes, including thorough proofreading and linguistic review, helps identify and correct errors or inconsistencies the AI algorithms may have missed. By incorporating human thought into the workflow, businesses can ensure the highest quality translations and maintain their brand reputation across different languages and cultures.

Feedback and Collaboration

Feedback from translators, reviewers, and end-users is invaluable for refining and improving the AI-powered TMS. Encouraging collaboration and open communication between the various stakeholders involved in the translation process fosters a feedback loop that helps identify areas for enhancement. The capacity to collaborate directly within a designated translation task, rather than relying on exchanging emails, represents a noteworthy time-saving advantage that will enhance managers' communication with team members. Making use of collaborative use of TMS helps enhance workflow. That will help translators provide insights into language nuances and specific requirements, while end-users can offer feedback on the clarity and effectiveness of the translations. This collaborative approach leads to continuous improvement and ensures that the AI-powered TMS evolves to meet the changing needs of the business and its target audience.

Conclusion

AI-powered Translation Management System (TMS) revolutionizes the translation process, offering improved accuracy, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. Businesses can streamline workflows and deliver high-quality localized content by integrating machine translation, neural machine translation, and AI-driven translation. The system efficiently handles multiple target languages, integrates with translation software and cloud services, and enhances quality control. With customization options, scalability, and data security, businesses can achieve significant cost savings while expanding globally. Collaboration with human translators, professional translation services, and utilizing translation tools and memory further optimize the translation experience. Continuous training, evaluation, and feedback foster ongoing improvement. Adopting an AI-powered TMS empowers businesses to communicate effectively with global audiences and achieve localization success.

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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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Lucky Eze

Lucky Ezeihuaku is an SEO expert and specialist Translation content writer with Bureau Works. He has a master’s degree in English and Literature, and has been writing professionally for at least 7 years. He has gone on to specialize in the Translation and Localization niche, churning out multiple quality, informative, and optimized articles for Bureau Works over the past year. He claims writing and developing SEO strategies keeps him going, and he’s also interested in Data Analytics.