Collaborative Translation Tool, Benefits for Your Enterprise

When you have a great team, you want to keep them happy, and you want them to do their best work. These two goals are closely related: when your team has the resources it needs to work effectively, people tend to enjoy their jobs and to feel a greater sense of accomplishment. We can take the example of a collaborative translation tool. It helps people work more closely together by centralizing workflows, and it can automate the busy work that distracts them from their real concerns. In the process, it can improve the quality of your translations. These are big promises, but real localization experts have actually built the technology that can keep those promises.

How a Collaborative Translation Tool Works

With the range of content and the range of stakeholders involved in localization, the possibilities for disasters and the opportunities for success are equally huge. When you look beyond the translators, editors, and reviewers to all the requesters and developers, the documentation team, marketers, UX and UI people, you realize the potential scope of collaboration and the power that that united effort can have.

Helping your team work together

A collaborative translation tool opens up active and transparent lines of communication across teams and departments. It allows translators to discuss projects with reviewers and other collaborators directly. But this tech does a lot more for the team than just expanding communication.Centralize assets. A localization management platform presents a critical no-brainer opportunity for you to maintain a single source of truth. This is where any and all collaborators can go to find terminology and stylistic resources—and it’s easier to keep them up to date all in one place. Regular access to these assets is the route to high-quality, consistent translations. And it is the antidote to inaccuracies, embarrassments, and more serious brand damage.Keep reviewers in the loop. Often in-country reviewers are slow to respond and difficult to stay in contact with. You can assume they have other responsibilities that take priority, and it’s common for reviewers to feel little real connection to your project from a distance—unless you have a way to really loop them in. A centralized, transparent platform gives them equal footing with everyone else on the team. They can be part of the communications, and they can be automatically assigned when it’s their turn to weigh in on the content life cycle. Plus, they can be looped into the bigger picture to understand what’s at stake and the best practices for representing your brand and your product just like every other team member.

Helping you make the best use of technology

The high level of automation in a collaborative translation tool can take a lot of the mechanical parts of localization away from busy team members.Stop emailing files. Instead of emailing files back and forth and uploading, downloading, and reformatting them, files can be loaded onto the centralized platform automatically when an update is performed. For greater control over the workflow as it enters the platform, a command-line interface (CLI) can be created while still eliminating all that uploading and downloading. The file remains in the platform as it is translated, edited, and checked for quality; it’s visible and accessible to everyone who needs it. And when a translation is approved, the integration is ready to repopulate your product with the localized update for a seamless, end-to-end process.Go straight to the best translator. When a file enters the system, it shouldn’t go blindly to the next available translator. It should go to the most qualified translator—ideally, one who is already familiar with your content and terminology needs. Translators have differing levels of experience and specialties, and AI can automatically match the best translator for the project using a system of tags. This process saves time without sacrificing the quality potential.Track progress. A collaborative translation tool produces data. When you can drill into real data—whether related to spending or translator progress—you can actively troubleshoot situations before they turn into problems. With an entirely transparent platform, you can analyze workflows on a granular level, spotting pain points such as bottlenecks, duplicated work, or excessive edits to translations in order to address the issues.Grow unimpeded. As your business grows, your localization needs will grow with it. You’ll likely add new languages, and you may introduce new types of material (such as video and graphics) and new stakeholders who need to be accommodated in the workflow. Once you have optimized your workflow in the centralized, automated platform, you will find that the platform is completely scalable. New flows can be added or new stakeholders included in them—without any changes to the basic system.

Choose a Service Provider That Stands Behind Its Tools

When you introduce a collaborative translation tool in your enterprise, you also expand your localization team to include a language service provider. Those expert team members are as important as the collaborative translation tool itself because the careful human talent and cutting-edge tech must go hand-in-hand. The enhanced communication, centralization, automation, and interdependency hinge on this new relationship. You want experienced and responsive partners who understand and are willing to get behind your goals alongside you.