Streamline Official Document Translation Services with Tech Solutions

When you’re looking for official document translation services, you’ll notice commonalities among many service-based agencies; they offer translators with expertise in different languages and all needed documentation, but they often overlook a critical component—cost-effectiveness.Many of the official documents you need to translate, like non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) or financial records, are relatively standardized, basic, and often done in bulk.

They don’t possess the “personality” of marketing language or the need for program understanding like in the case of app localization. As a result, the goal should be accuracy at maximum cost-effectiveness. This is what makes technology an ideal solution for official document translation services.

The Obstacle with Service-Based Document Translation

Most company leaders have a strict focus on the bottom line. Every decision they make, no matter how small, needs to consider its impact on the overall health of the business.

They need to evaluate operation leanness, efficiency, and overhead expenses. It’s the “lean mindset,” the business strategy that focuses on eliminating steps that create waste and slow production. As a leader, you need to carefully review your employees’ daily workload to see where the most time loss occurs.

Document translation services can be a huge culprit in lost time. If you have recurring requests for translations, chances are you’ll need someone to manage them.

That person will need to perform core management responsibilities, such as submitting and tracking requests, conducting quality control, and handling billing. As more requests come in, the project can continue to grow to the point where you now have a full-time employee or an entire team managing just your communications with translation services.

Many leaders make a common mistake when evaluating an agency.

They submit one or two pieces of documentation for translation and determine their future partnership based on those results. However, that’s not an accurate valuation of those services.

Perhaps the agency’s best translator is employed for the pilot program, but once they have the contract, they scale back on quality. The only true indicator of service quality comes from a stress test where they have to juggle multiple deadlines and requests while also practicing effective communication skills. However, such an extensive pilot program isn’t feasible for most companies.Any way you look at it, official document translation services can become a significant cost for an organization.

To truly streamline these services while managing costs, technology is the solution.

Using Tech to Tackle Official Document Translation Services

Most official forms work from templates. If you have one NDA suitably translated, you can use that as a guide for future translations, eliminating the need to repeatedly recreate it—all you’ll need to do is adjust a few fields. But a personnel-centered agency likely doesn’t have the systems in place to effectively leverage all the valuable past knowledge, so they translate one isolated piece of content at a time.

A collaborative translation platform is different. The second a client signs up with a platform, a profile is created that includes their translation memories, corporate lexicons, glossaries, term bases, and specific needs.

The translator taps into that cumulative knowledge base to guide their future projects, ensuring consistency across all tasks. For example, if they see an NDA was already translated, they’ll use that as a guide to streamline their workflow. Through this platform, instead of needing to start from scratch, they can work with what is already established and approved and make adjustments for the particular case.

Centralize Your Document Translation Projects with Technology Solutions

A platform acts as the central location for all operations, from relationship management to review and fine-tuning of individual translations. Documents are uploaded to one central, secure, encrypted location, allowing translators and other collaborators to easily access them.

This eliminates the risk of hacked emails or misplaced files, which can occur when leaning on a hired translator. A comprehensive platform approach treats a client’s individual projects as small parts of the whole—parts that can inform each other and build a source of truth along the way.

A simple translation firm, however, will look at each request as a separate project, leading to lost opportunities to streamline and to minimize costs.Official document translation services can be a significant cause of operational and financial waste. Aside from the time employees must spend managing them, there’s also the risk of inconsistent quality and redundant work.

An integrated translation platform ecosystem, on the other hand, uses all past jobs to guide future ones, streamlining productivity and minimizing overall costs for the entire organization.