Have you heard this term – translation memory (TM) – when shopping for translation services?
You may have an inkling of the concept behind it: a database that offers discounts based on the use of your previously-translated content.
But – did you know: that it’s an essential tool to keep messaging consistent; that it produces faster translation turnarounds overall; and that your TM discounts compound as your database grows?
Understanding the power of your translation memory is the first step to ensuring you soak up ALL the juicy benefits your TM has to offer!
Let’s get into the nitty-gritty of translation memory so you know exactly what to expect and what questions to ask when purchasing translation services.
Let’s start with the basics…
What is translation memory (TM)?
Translation memory is a database that stores translated content for your specific company.
When you request translation, the language services provider (LSP) compares your TM with the new content, searching for matching segments. These matching segments are ones you don’t have to pay full price for!
Basically, it’s a way to save time and money using your already-translated content.
And, the larger your TM database, the more discounts you’re likely to receive.
Faster translation turnaround
This may seem obvious, but the more matching segments that are found in your TM, the less the content translators need to translate, and the less time it takes to deliver the project.
Matching TM segments are pulled into translation software for expert language professionals to review during the translation step. They ensure that the matching segments fit the context of the new document perfectly before applying them to the final translation.
As your TM database grows, the more likely it is there will be matching segments in new translations, and the faster your project turnaround will be.
Translation memory cultivates consistency
Utilizing your TM database also keeps messaging consistent throughout all your material.
For example, content containing scientific or medical terms should be translated the very same way every time to maintain consistency.
If “using the stethoscope” was translated into German in your translation project from 5 months ago, and it comes up again in a new German translation project, it should be translated the same way.
Consistency is good for business, and good for your reputation.
Consumers and clients know what to expect when reading material from your company. Any inconsistent messaging is confusing and will turn-off clients and consumers from using your product or service; it could even appear to be dangerously unprofessional.
Owning your translation memory
Did you know that you own your TM, and can request it at any time from your current LSP?
Owning and having easy access to your TM is a powerful tool when it comes to negotiating project pricing.
When seeking a new or replacement LSP to handle your translation project, you can provide them with the existing TM for your company for the requested language(s) and speak with them about how they apply TM discounts.
Questions to ask about translation memory
Next time you talk to your translation vendor, or when seeking a new vendor, make sure to ask:
What is your translation memory discount structure?
Will my company have access to our TM database at any time?
Tell me about your translation memory database and how it will benefit my organization.
If you already have access to your translation memory database, and are seeking a new vendor, ask:
What discounts can I expect with my existing translation memory?
If you’ve made it all the way to the end of this blog, great job!
You now know more about what translation memory is, how it benefits your organization, and how to talk to language services providers about it.
Have you been tasked with finding translation services for a project at your job – but have no idea where to start?
Or maybe, you’ve been executing translation projects for years, but never completely understood the process. You throw it over the fence, so to speak, and *hope* you get the best price and best quality in return.
Don’t worry – this blog is here to help!
Whether you use translation services on a daily basis or every once in a while, following these tips will maximize your projects’ success while increasing your bottom line.
1. Always take advantage of Translation Memory discounts.
What is Translation Memory?
Translation memory (TM) is an advanced database that stores all your organization’s already-translated content.
When you submit a new translation project, the database runs it against all the TM stored for your company and searches for matching segments of words between them.
“Perfect” to “Fuzzy” matches found by the database are segments you do not pay full price for— which can add up to considerable savings for your organization.
Plus, savings compound over time as you submit more translation projects and build your organization’s unique TM!
Some Language Services Providers (LSPs) use TM databases, some don’t.
Ask your current LSP about your TM database and discounts—or if you’re shopping around—put translation memory discounts on your list of topics to discuss with potential LSPs.
2. Provide original, editable files to save money, and time!
Did you know: if you provide the original, text-editable documents for your project, you will both pay less and save time?
Yes! It’s true… But why?
Because providing NON-editable files, like PDFs, scans, and images requires extra steps in the quoting and delivery process.
Non-editable files must go through a process called Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to pull text out of the file for translation. Unfortunately, this also means losing most of the formatting found in the original documents.
Files then must be recreated with Desktop Publishing (DTP) in order to match the original format of the documents – adding DTP service fees to the quote.
The lesson here: Always provide original, editable files when submitting translation projects.
It is much faster to get a quote, and, you’ll save money by avoiding steep DTP service fees.
3. Know the essential steps that result in quality translation.
Professional, quality translation does not happen in one step – and anyone telling you otherwise is doing you a disservice.
Though the steps in the translation process can vary depending on your needs, there are basic steps that are pretty much universal in the language services industry:
Document preparation
Translation
Linguistic review by AT LEAST 2 translators
DTP services (document & file formatting)
Quality assurance check & delivery
Client review
Knowing, and understanding, the basic steps of translation puts the power in your hands when discussing a project with a new or current LSP.
Don’t hesitate to ask detailed questions about any steps for which you need clarification.
An experienced LSP will be happy to answer your questions in detail and provide recommendations based on your project’s requirements.
4. Cheap translation = cheap quality.
How much quality are you willing to give up when it comes to price?
This is an essential question when it comes to weighing your options among multiple quotes from LSPs.
Though it can be tempting to go with the cheapest option, the quality of your translation will certainly suffer if you do.
Why?
Because of the Scope Triangle (aka Quality Triangle) – a well-known concept in project management illustrating the relationship and trade-offs between the 3 primary forces in a project: Time, Cost, and Quality.
When one force is fixed (usually time), the other 2 forces will vary in inverse proportion to each other.
For a translation project this basically means—if you want cheap translation, you will get cheap quality in return, because it is impossible to produce great quality if the cost is too low.
Now, if quality is not important to you, then by all means, buy cheap!
But for the vast majority of us who value quality results, understand you do get what you pay for.
As you weigh the options between multiple quotes ask the LSPs what their quality assurance process looks like, and again, never hesitate to ask questions to make a better-informed decision.
Have questions? Don’t hesitate to contact us here at Teneo Linguistics Company. Click here!
You are a multinational corporation that uses translation services on a daily basis with an annual volume of translated words that reaches well into the millions.
You have at least two large Language Services Providers who service your high-volume translation needs and are large corporations with a sizable footprint.
Sure, you want to work with more businesses, and perhaps throw a few smaller, minority-owned businesses into the mix to enrich your diversity supplier program.
Or, maybe you’d like to know if your company is maximizing cost savings through leveraging already-translated content or by using AI-powered machine translation.
But… your language services vendors say you better stick with them. Why? Because they “sit” on the largest volume of already-translated content in the form of translation memory databases, and you are, naturally, getting the best deal with them.
In fact, you might hear the pitch from one of your vendors to “centralize your localization program” with a single vendor — them.
Yes, centralizing your localization program offers many valuable benefits to your organization, but their single-vendor pitch has one HUGE flaw.
You do not have to settle for working with one Language Services Provider to achieve your centralization goals.
Centralizing and owning your localization and translation process within your organization CAN be achieved successfully, no matter how many Language Services Providers you work with.
How? To understand that, let us look at the benefits of centralization individually, and how owning your localization process relates to each one.
1. Control Over Your Content/Data
Translation work is subject to copyright. Once you pay your bill, the translated content —and the translation memory database created from it —belongs to you.
At Teneo Linguistics Company, we ask our customers if their translation memories are under their legal and physical control, and 9 times out of 10 the answer is “No”.
In most cases, it is the language vendor who is in control of the data, and therefore, in control of:
How savings are calculated
How your translation memory databases are maintained and managed
Who has access to your data
The argument for centralizing with only one vendor does not hold here because you would give total control of your very valuable, company-specific memory into the hands of another company, instead of diversifying your risk.
2. One Technology
Different language vendors use different technology, workflows, glossaries, and terminological databases to process your translation and localization projects.
The process of migrating multiple vendors under one technology may seem like a deterrent to centralizing, but there are incredible benefits to gaining control and owning the process.
If you centralize with a single vendor, you lose control over:
What technology is used
Its effectiveness for your organization
Modifying the technology to be compliant to company standards
All security considerations
Take control of your language process by making an informed decision about which centralized technology and which processes work best for your company’s needs.
Seek professional translation and localization consulting services to aid in finding the best-fit solution for your company. They will also assess your current localization program with you and make recommendations on how to reach your localization goals.
3. Financial Savings
Consolidating all your translation memory databases from all your language services vendors into one location gives you better leverage for negotiating volume discounts and cost savings for repetitive content.
But this only works well under two conditions:
If you have full access to all your data and the process of how fees are calculated.
If the translation memory is maintained and curated effectively, and/or if the AI-powered machine translation engines are properly trained and retrained.
If these two conditions are not met, you will still be at the mercy of your vendor’s pricing with no negotiating leverage.
Experienced localization and translation consulting services offer solutions for maintaining and curating your translation memory databases to gain maximum cost savings.
4. Effectiveness
If multiple users within your organization need access to submit translation projects, it can be a real headache when working with multiple vendors. Each one has a different process, a different portal to sign into, different workflows, and separate technology to learn.
This is where implementing centralization, and more importantly, simplification, makes sense.
In a single vendor scenario, you do not have control over how workflows are created or what processes are followed.
In a multi-vendor scenario, centralizing all your language vendors under one technology gives you COMPLETE control over customizing and creating workflows that work best for specific translation projects.
For example: Vendor-A offers dramatically lower rates for translation while Vendor-B offers lower rates for review. To maximize cost savings, you decide you want to set up a workflow that always sends documents to Vendor-A for translation, and Vendor-B for review. With a centralized solution, you can!
It is much more efficient to be able to create that workflow in one centralized location that contains your complete translation memory databases—than to try and set it up in separate portals with separate translation memory databases.
5. Evaluating Performance
Every organization strives to accomplish important goals and KPIs including reducing cycle time, achieving financial savings, or working on continuous improvement. But how do you improve these KPIs in regard to the workflow of your organization’s chosen Language Services Providers?
With no direct insight into your vendors processes, it is difficult to evaluate how they are performing—whether you have one supplier or multiple.
Ask yourself:
Do you have access to reporting on how well suppliers are achieving deadlines across all projects?
Do you know what the total volume savings is with each supplier and how it changes over time?
Do you know how nonconformances are handled?
This is critical information that every organization should have easy access to when evaluating vendor performance and when determining how to improve their KPIs.
What we have here is really not a case of using multiple vendors vs. just one. This centralization scenario is more about taking control of the process in a meaningful way for you and your organization’s goals.
How Do I Centralize the Process?
So, how do you achieve all of these incredible benefits? Consider centralizing your localization process but instead of centralizing with one supplier:
Keep all the suppliers you like.
Take control of the process and your data.
And keep it under your own roof.
Owning your own Translation Management System (TMS) is a completely realistic solution that allows you to consolidate all your translation memory databases from all your vendors into one secure location.
There is no need to invent or build anything, there are many TMS solutions made specifically for corporations looking to centralize their localization processes.
You can then have have multiple Language Services Providers working and focusing on what they do best – translation. Meanwhile, you are in complete control of maintaining and leveraging your translation memory databases.
More benefits of owning your own TMS include:
Being legally and financially protected.
Easy usability with one simple way to upload files and submit translation projects.
Ability to monitor your project’s progress with complete transparency.
Detailed reporting that includes supplier performance metrics.
Automated processes to reduce cycle time and increase cost savings.
The benefits to your organization adopting a centralized localization system are endless!
Wait, you say you have no one on your staff to manage the TMS? No problem! You can hire a consulting service to set the system up and manage it for you, perhaps by embedding their own employee into your company so they would be available to you at all times.
The choices are plentiful and will likely vary from corporation to corporation depending on their specific centralization goals.
Look for centralized solutions that help you achieve your goals, put control and ownership squarely into your hands, and allow you to continuously maintain full compliance.
The founder of Teneo Linguistics Company (TLC), Hana Laurenzo, recently took a trip to her home town of Prague, capitol of the Czech Republic, and made a stop at our favorite CAT tool’s headquarters – Memsource!
Memsource is one of our trusted partners; we depend on their software in our translation process, as it is instrumental in helping us efficiently provide high-quality, consistent – and even discounted! – documents via its “translation memory” tools.
Did you know that discounted translation is possible using TM (translation memory) – when language services providers utilize CAT tools like Memsource?
If your organization regularly uses professional translation services, and these terms and concepts are completely foreign to you, let’s break it down and get you “in the know”.
What is a CAT tool?
A CAT (computer-assisted or computer-aided translation) tool is a computer software program that aids translators in executing translation of text by making the process more efficient, consistent, and contextually accurate. Here are few key components of CAT tools:
Translation memory
Text search tools
Index/concordance tools
Terminology databases
Translation management
Quality check
Formatting
Alignment
Import/export functions
Analysis tools
These features, skillfully used, help us deliver a polished, professional, quality translation result.
DO NOT confuse CAT tools with machine translation or free translation engines – like Google Translate. Utilizing free translation engines can damage your brand, with inaccurate results.
Our language professionals use years of experience to translate every word with cultural context and target audience in mind. CAT tool technology aids translators in performing translation activities efficiently and consistently so that your translation project is of higher quality, and potentially delivered within a shorter timeframe.
What is Translation Memory?
A translation memory (TM) is created for each of our clients by utilizing your existing translated material, adding to it each time a new document is translated, effectively “recycling” your content. In this way we maintain consistency throughout your documents, thereby avoiding “reinventing the wheel” for existing text, with the result that you save on translation costs in the process!
Understanding how TM provides discounted translation and how it benefits your bottom line is broken down in the simple example below.
Discounted Translation with TM
Let’s say you have an employee handbook (or another human resources document) that needs translation, and you issue a new version to your employees every year. Most of the content is the same from year-to-year but you always have some updates.
The first time you get the document translated it is stored in our TM database for your company in Memsource. We can now use this “memory” to run against other documents you need translated in the future; when they contain new text, it too is stored in the company “memory”.
Then the next year, when you need the updated version of your employee handbook translated, the database runs it against the ever-growing TM stored for your company. It searches for matching segments of words and pulls in the previous translation, indicating how well it matches that previous version.
Perfect to “fuzzy” matches that the database finds are segments you do not have to pay full price for – and these can add up to CONSIDERABLE SAVINGS.
Partnership at its Finest
Memsource has provided their trusted CAT tool since 2011, and we at Teneo Linguistics Company have utilized it since 2014. Our language professionals and project managers depend on it for the continued success of our client’s projects. We are always impressed by their staff’s quick responsiveness, valuable innovations, and willingness to hear our feedback on their incredible software.
During Hana’s visit at Memsource headquarters she met with the Memsource team and learned all about their new and upcoming features as well as their roadmap for future innovations. These updates are sure to bring continuous improvement to our translation process and allow us to better serve our customers.
