What is translation management?
Translation management is the automation of the translation process, eliminating repetitive and laborious manual tasks while enabling control and delivering greater efficiency. This process coordinates the translation of content into multiple languages and the involvement of various stakeholders. It employs technology, tools and workflows to streamline the process, ensuring accuracy and consistency.
Translation management is particularly important for businesses and organizations that operate in multiple countries or regions and need to provide their content in multiple languages. Effective translation management ensures that the translated content resonates with the target audience.
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What are the use cases for translation management?
Use cases for translation management include:
- Estimation and tracking of translation costs
- Standardization of workflow and tools
- Data metrics for process improvements
- Centralization of linguistic data
What are the business benefits of translation management?
With translation management, you can benefit from:
- Reduced time to market: Translation throughput is increased by leveraging machine translation and previous human translation, and time to market is reduced by standardizing and automating manual processes.
- Increased translation quality: Centralized translation memory (TM), terminology and dictionaries that can be easily shared with all stakeholders ensure increased translation quality, consistency and accuracy.
- Seamless supply-chain collaboration: Increased collaboration and integration between translators, departments, connected systems and translation vendors improves cooperation and the efficiency of the translation process.
How do content management and translation management differ?
Content management refers to the business processes and system software used to capture, store, manage and distribute text, images and other digitized information. Translation management incorporates project management capabilities in addition to workflow, ties into translation memory and translator tools, and stores information about individual translation resources.
What is a translation management system (TMS) and how does it work?
A translation management system (TMS), such as Trados Accelerate or Trados Enterprise, unifies and centralizes disconnected translation processes into a single, integrated and efficient methodology with workflows that automate and simplify the localization process. It manages the flow of global content through the localization process, including translation, the sharing of linguistic data and the application of reusable content via workflow automation according to predefined business rules and project information.
A centralized system also unifies parallel translation efforts that might be happening across different departments and promotes cost savings, consistency and control. Information is tracked through every step in the translation process whether using internal or external resources.
Does a TMS integrate with my existing content repository?
Yes. Many translation management systems are based on open standards-based architectures that enable seamless integration with other enterprise applications, allowing content contributors to work with content resources wherever they are stored. The most common content repositories include content management systems, digital asset management (DAM), software configuration management (SCM), databases and file systems.
Translation management solutions are most effective and show the most benefit when content is easily accessible. The ability to work in preferred systems to automatically submit content for translation, rather than manually moving files back and forth, optimizes quality, speed and customer experience. Solutions with standard out-of-the-box connectors, minimal configuration requirements and specialized connector creation options allow you to quickly and easily centralize your translation programs.
Does a TMS offer business management features?
Translation management systems typically provide estimation and tracking so you know your translation costs before asking for quotes from translation vendors. Some also provide business intelligence through out-of-the-box and custom reporting on translation performance metrics for continuous process improvement. Others include advanced business management capabilities to create and manage invoicing and bookkeeping.
If you are working with multiple language service providers and translators, you can effectively manage multiple vendors, track the status of project quotes and easily report on project status, saving you time and money.
What type of project management and workflow features does a TMS offer?
A task-based workflow, consisting of human and automated tasks, is established for each content type and target language. Individual resources receive notification via email when they have work to do, and users can also view a summary of all their outstanding tasks.
Projects can be created based on any number of localization jobs, allowing for consolidated scheduling of each stage of the project and for specific milestones to be set, with reminders sent to users before delivery dates. The project manager can monitor the status of each job and reassign tasks as necessary.
