An Extra Dab Will Do You: Why You Need Translation

Over the years, I’ve regularly fielded client inquiries such as “We desperately need a system. What are the options?” While probing to find out just what it is they’re looking for, I often discover that they’ve surrendered to some buzz around the latest invention of the Silicon Valley Dream Machine. The balance of our discussion revolves around helping them understand exactly what it is that they want or need.

“Translation management systems” (TMS) fall into that category of the absolutely necessary, but often ineffable, technology du jour. In this column, I define just what I mean by TMS, outline the core functions that the category delivers, discuss the companies most likely to buy one, and present leading alternatives.

Translation Management and Why It Matters
At its simplest, translation has always involved a person, a text, and some writing implement to record the output. In today’s corporations and government agencies, this act of rendering words in other languages has morphed into a major business function as these organizations strive to maximize their outreach.

• For a global presence. Companies can reach roughly 85 percent of the world’s GDP with translations into 17 languages for the top 25 economies (see Common Sense Advisory’s report, “On the Web, Some Countries Matter More than Others,” Sep07). More ambitious? It would take 83 languages to reach 80 percent of all the people on Planet Earth, regardless of whether they’re good prospects. Want everyone on Terra to know who you are? That will take more than 7,000 languages.
• For domestic multicultural markets. You say that you don’t do business internationally. Okay, how can you build a relationship with your neighbors who prefer speaking other languages? To maximize reach among residents of the U.S., you'll need to adapt your content into Spanish. For firms in India pitching to the whole nation, the ante goes up to the 29 Indic languages spoken by a million or more people each (see Common Sense Advisory’s report, “India Beyond English,” May08).

Sooner rather than later, the complexity of translating even a few documents into a few languages will tax the mental capacities and bookkeeping of that single translator with his all-purpose quill and papyrus. Enter collaborators to help with billing, review, other languages, specialty paper types, and, before you know it, our translator needs a project manager to sort out his growing staff, burgeoning budget, tools to automate his process, reference materials, invoicing, integration with other systems, and client communication. He quickly finds himself strumming a fairly regular rhythm for each project.

Meanwhile, his colleagues want him and his team to translate more websites, marketing collateral, product documentation, information for employees, and even user-produced content into more and more languages. His budget to do so grows, but not nearly fast enough to keep pace with the mushrooming demand. He brings in an external agency to do the work, but quickly finds that just one translation firm isn’t enough. He needs several, choosing from thousands who can help him with the peculiar combinations of language, country, content type, file type, and repository in which content is stored.

Over time, he discovers that his team’s previous translations offer some insight into future projects. They begin to systematically capture and validate the quality of frequently translated phrases, discover terms that should be used regularly, and extrapolate repeatable styles for future documents. Sharing these resources across translation projects, among colleagues in different offices, with his outsourcers, and across languages drives a “Eureka moment,” when he realizes that nearly all he has done thus far could be formalized and even automated.

Enter Formal Translation Management Systems
These large-scale translation efforts rely on the rigorous choreography of human resources, processes, events, technology, and a wide range of other activities. In an ideal world, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software vendors such as Oracle and SAP would have encouraged their many third-party partners to build components and workflows to introduce corporate translation departments and language service providers into the ERP fold.

But they didn’t. In their absence, some corporations and language service providers (LSPs) with translation needs chose to build their own solutions from the ground up, adapt productivity tools like Office and Project to the task, or do a combination of the two. Others turned to a new category of software that entered the market in 1999 as simple translation workflow, ambitiously christened itself “globalization management software” in 2001, and ultimately deflated that pretension into the more descriptive moniker of “translation management system” or TMS.

The TMS category covers a range of features, functions, implementation models, and deployment modes. We define TMS as follows:

A translation management system orchestrates the business functions, project tasks, process workflows, and language technologies that underpin large-scale translation activity. TMS software coordinates the work of many participants in the communications value chain, working inside, outside, and across organizations.

In the Common Sense Advisory typology of this market, we distinguish between commercially available TMSes (for example, Across Language Server, Kilgray MemoQ, LTC Worx, MultiCorpora MultiTrans, and SDL TMS (and WorldServer) and house solutions available only with a language services contract from an agency (for example, Elanex ElanexINSIDE, Language Line LingoNET, Lionbridge Freeway, SAJAN GCMS, and thebigword LanguageDirector), although that distinction is eroding. Some service providers plan to open up and allow clients to use their solution for multi-vendor outsourcing, essentially eliminating the distinction. Another alternative is open-source solutions such as Global Sight Ambassador and Project Open.

TMS Roughly Equates to ERP for Translation Companies or Departments
At a very basic level, successfully globalized companies see translation as a business process like any other major service inside their organization. Therefore, they might subject TMS initiatives to the same rigor as other business activities. But because most companies outsource some or most of their translation work, cost and ROI factors in fact invite greater scrutiny than for translation’s older – and less supervised – siblings, technical authoring and marketing communications. One strategic planner told us, “It’s not that it’s a lot of money, it’s that it’s new money.” In other words, the older sibs have their budgets baked in, but it’s difficult for executives at the VP level to raise their hands and ask for this new line item.

Instead, committees will explore how they can do it in the most systematic, efficient, and cost-effective way – even if this causes delay to other strategic initiatives. As with ERP-driven manufacturing and supply chain applications, they strive for consistency in operations, accuracy, timeliness, and control. TMS solutions promise these traditional ERP-like benefits for the translation process. Vendors pitch better control, more insight into operations, agility, and optimized use of resources. Depending on the design goals and implementation maturity of any given product, a TMS can manage all aspects of a language service provider’s operation – or that of a language department within an organization.

Don DePalma is the founder and chief research officer of the research and consulting firm Common Sense Advisory, and author of the premier book on business globalization “Business Without Borders: A Strategic Guide to Global Marketing.”