Corporate quality strategy

Translation buyers should have a clear quality strategy in place: even if you are working with the most professional and experienced language service providers or professionals.I It is crucial that you make your stylistic preference explicit and company specific terminology available. If you allow translators to make assumptions about how you want to communicate with your customers, you greatly increase the chances that this will lead to inconsistent messaging.

Your corporate translation strategy should be to take control over your linguistic assets: translation memories, terminology and style guides in all languages. Managing your translation memories centrally will enable you to leverage from all translation projects irrespective of the collaboration model you have applied and will enable you to save costs.

Collaboration models

Translation is still an activity that requires considerable human effort. Even the most automated approach that benefits from machine translation and workflow is driven by linguists, so an important challenge for corporations is to enable project stakeholders to collaborate successfully.

Centralise or offshore, in- or outsource and everything in between, single, dual or multi-source … the options are numerous. Your choice will depend on your strategy: do you want to take full control and invest in efficiency by centralising and internalising the translation production, or do you want to benefit from vendor expertise and scale but in return give in on visibility? (the ‘black box’ syndrome).

RFQ/SLA

Once you have decided upon a collaboration model that best fits your context and requirements, it is time to make your quality expectations explicit to all parties. Translate them into RFQs and send them out to potential vendors, or renew your current relationships by adding a service level agreement to the contract, defining quality in an unambiguous manner and setting clear penalties for non-conformity.