Managing multilingual documents is a time consuming error prone and expensive task, particularly when dealing with dynamic documents, such as web contents. Automation facilitates all aspects related to multilingual web content management from negotiating translation request quotations through production of final localised output as well as its verification, and delivery. These activities are based on a series of automated tasks generally referred to as Translation Management System (TMS). Automation helps translation companies by interoperating enterprise translation services and help them implement a standardised process for managing all the business processes
At present e-commerce companies express an urgent demand for accurate, appropriate, timely, high-value translation to localise their websites in multiple languages. Inorder to meet such demands some have turned to engineering solutions, new applications have been developed to allow real time browsing of web pages with automatic translation of web sites, e-mail messages or search engine results.
However many users have learned that machine translation (MT) will rarely satisfy all of their varying communication needs
The History of Localization
Twenty years ago ‘localization’ as a profession and industry did not exist. In the intervening two decades, localization has emerged as a profession related to, but distinct from, translation, and as an industry in its own right. As the localization industry developed, standards became increasingly important. The development of Unicode in 1987, and its success at unifying character sets, had an enormous impact. Another important change was the introduction of a “single world-wide binary”, i.e. development of one version of a program that supports all languages.
The fundamentals of choosing right vendors for localization
Many organisations make use of LSPs (Language Service Provider) to source their translations. Employing translators could be an expensive exercise and is not always feasible.
There are some steps that need to be followed to not only select a vendor, but to select the right vendor that will meet your project requirements.
- Internal requirements collection
- What domain experience should the vendor have e.g. medical, gaming, law, etc.?
- What’s your target languages?
- Should the vendor have an ISO 9000 certificate?
- Do you need them to use your CAT tool or do you want to use theirs?
- Which services do you require; translation, glossary creation, Localization Quality Assurance, etc.
- Estimated work volume.
- Request For Information
- Select a few vendors and do a formal request for information.
- Request For Proposal-Select two or more vendors that meet the project’s requirements and request them to submit a formal business proposal .
- Review the proposals-When reviewing you’ll take into consideration their rates, location, experience, supported file formats and SLAs.
- Select two vendors at a minimum.
- Submitting a Test Project-You want to ensure upfront that their quality is of the utmost best. Finding out in the middle of a project that the translation quality is poor can have a huge effect on the project’s budget.
- Submit a small test project of your product to each of the vendors-After completion of these projects, the opposite vendor rates the quality of the translations.
- Review the Test Projects Quality Rating
- Review each of the projects’ results individually
- Should one of the vendors have performed very poorly, submit the report to them for evaluation.
- Select your Vendor
- Based on the quality rating, cost, location, etc. differences between the vendors select the most appropriate vendor for your project.
- Sign the MSA (Master Service Agreement) & NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement), if required, with the selected vendor:
Few advantages of using smart tools to streamline these processes
Translation technology, which aims to partially or totally automate the translation process, has been undergoing development at high speed in recent years.
The control of the translation process is being transferred from translators to computers, according to the European Language Industry Survey 2022, with 45% of language company respondents reporting that more than 25% of their projects are run using automated workflows. Translation management, especially, is less about automatic translation and more about automating the process
What are the various reasons translation companies in contemporary times are choosing to use smart tools like Awtomated
- Reducing or eliminating manual steps in the translation process, such as file conversions, word counting, and quality checks
- Using business rules or artificial intelligence (AI) to apply certain workflow steps or automated content modifications based on content submitted for translation (e.g., pretranslation using MT)
- Connecting content platforms to translation systems (i.e., connecting a content management system or CMS to a translation management system or TMS, automating the transfer of content to and from translation)
- Automating and routing file transfers (i.e., routing translatable content to external translators or reviewers, ensuring strict quality control or compliance by ensuring steps are not skipped in the process)
Awtomated is one such smart tool which is designed to streamline workflow and help translation companies in automating their translation business processes.
