Does my company need a translation management system

For organizations with cross border clients and partners, it's important to localize and better communicate with them in their native language. Translation is usually one required fixed costs to doing cross border business.

Traditional translation workflows are generally labor intensive, error-prone, and difficult to administrate. It usually requires copying and pasting translations into a master spreadsheet that is worked on and shared over email and requires much back and forth and copy and pasting. Another spreadsheet is used to track translators and their progress, as well as costs and time estimates.

A translation management system (TMS) is software that helps translation teams automate manual and repetitive steps. Some of these features includes editing the translation texts, customizing user workflow and notifications, and generating summary reports.

Below are signs a company should implement a TMS:

Time to Translate Not Fast Enough

While professional high quality translation takes time to review and localize appropriately, document workflow requiring human intervention also adds considerable time in the translation process. Once a document is translated, it may need to go through quality, compliance, and editorial reviews.

Translation management systems can optimize some of the back and forth between different teams working on the same document by automating workflows to keep content moving forward. This include notifications based on priority and urgency as well as visual context allows translators to preview how the content will look in the final document.

Poor Translation Quality

Translation Management Systems ensure higher quality translation because most of them allow for the integration of specific machine translation engines. At TranslateFX we pair our TMS with finance and legal specific AI machine translation engines (or custom train models for select clients) to ensure they their system is outfitted with the most appropriate AI engine. It ensures companies are maximizing efficiency with their adoption of our TMS. Other translation tools like glossaries and translation memory help translators maintain brand voice and style, creating consistent readability across documents new and old.

Large Volumes of Documents To Translate

The number of documents increase quickly over time when they need to be archived and translated into multiple languages. This is particular true for organizations who produce new reports and documents frequently.

Translation management systems offer a centralized location for all documents in the translation process. This also includes categorizing documents based on type, version history, user assignments, projects, as well as overall translation progress. Sometimes TMS are integrated with existing Content Management Systems (CMS), Document Management Systems (DMS), Marketing Automation platforms, and even other external outside vendors/freelancers to smoothen the entire content workflow processes.

Difficulty Tracking Translation Status/Progress

When the list of projects, document types, and number of documents are more than a few at any given time, the status of each can become overwhelming to manage. Master spreadsheets are no longer good enough to keep track of everything that is being worked on anymore.

Translation management systems allow for a multitude of ways to review and dissect the progress of the company, and any one project, task, team or individual translator. It can also automatically assign and notify new tasks to translators, and automatically submit content for editorial review. This saves the company from time and errors by streamlining all the different translation document workflows.

Bilingual Employees Relied Upon for Translation

Often times, bilingual employees are relied upon to translate documents. It is less a problem when the task is infrequent, but when they are relied upon consistently it is important to consider whether the employee is fluent in the language or just proficient. Or whether it is worth their time considering their role and job description. More often than not, bilingual employees are not professional enough leading to poor quality translations and localization. Full-time translators tend to have the experience and skills to not only perform the job better but also faster with a TMS.

Translation Becoming Too Costly

Translation management systems can provide significant efficiencies through the use of AI machine translation engines and translation memory. This results in cheaper translations as repetitive and similar sentences will automatically be translated based on prior work. This investment in translation memory and also glossaries cuts down the cost to translate over time. Translation management systems also offer analytics and reporting to make it easier to monitor spend and the productivity of the translation team.

Overall, translation management system allow organizations to more rapidly translate and localize documents, with minimal cost, downtime, and errors.