The translation industry is gaining momentum, and there is a high demand for professional translation management services. Today, any business with a global vision cannot do without brand translation and localization. However, the global competition is becoming intense which makes it even more challenging for language service providers to cope with modern translation demands.
Lack of vision, poor management, and complicated workflow keep things chaotic, and LSPs end up wasting their resources and money. This article highlights some major mistakes that LSPs are likely to make and what are the precautions to avoid them.
Major Mistakes LSPs Must Avoid in The First Place
Overlook Quality Over Cost
Sometimes LSPs prioritize cost over quality which makes them end up producing poor-quality content. The inability to meet quality criteria requires more investment to fix things through edits or project redo. So, in the end, quality suffers, and no cost is saved. Professional language service providers must avoid this issue by keeping the quality first at all costs. When you don’t invest in the right tools and hire cheap resources, it is only going to stretch the deadlines and waste your efforts on edits and excessive QA processes.
To build your career as a professional LSP, you must make a strong foundation by using high-quality tools to ensure seamless processes and optimized workflow.
Not Hiring a Project Manager
Again, it’s about saving costs. Most LSPs don’t think hiring project managers can make any difference, so they rather keep things going without them. Not having a project manager may leave your translation teams on their own, which leads to a lack of project knowledge, conflicts, delays, and quality issues. LSPs end up creating a chaotic environment with complicated processes, insecure data, redundant information, and whatnot. LSPs, who have to deal with large-scale translation projects regularly, must have reliable project managers on their side.
The project manager’s role is to enable seamless communication between translation teams, keep the workflow optimized, and evaluate the progress of translation projects. Even if you are using a translation project management system, project managers make things go in the right direction from the beginning till the end.
Ignoring Culture Context
The translation involves more than the conversion of words from one language to another. It is important to keep the translated content relevant to the original context. Also paying attention to the target culture is also important. Most LSPs totally ignore the culture while working on translation projects. As a result, the translated content is not so engaging and doesn’t resonate with the target audience. Such content can’t help businesses scale themselves in foreign markets. So, the cultural relevance of your translations with the target market is important that will help content reach larger audiences. It is always recommended to hire native translators because they understand the social nuances and generate culture-appropriate content. LSPs who deal with high-end clients can hire culture consultants to assist their teams in generating high-quality and culture-friendly content.
Using An Open-Source MT Tool
Many open-source machine translation tools are available online that offer free content translation. LSPs with limited translation budgets sometimes get assistance from such tools and produce poor-quality translations. Open-source tools can totally ignore the context behind the message and are unable to produce culturally suitable translations. When LSPs provide machine-generated translations, they eventually ruin their reputation in the market and get bad reviews from the clients.
It is important for language service providers to avoid using free MT tools. Even if they want to use a machine translation post-editing method to generate their translation, they must use the best localization management system with a paid MT tool only. Paid tools generate better quality translations than open-source ones. Yet, it is important to involve humans at each level of content generation and quality assurance. All machine-generated content must be proofread and edited by human translators only.
Not Prioritizing Security
LSPs have to deal with critical client information such as financial documents, legal agreements, or medical reports; they must ensure the confidentiality of data provided to them. When they don’t handle a client’s data carefully, openly upload it on third-party apps, or send it to multiple translators without having signed an information disclosure agreement with them, it may lead to privacy breaches and data leaks. For any language service provider, it is very important to prioritize the security of the data provided to them and ensure 100% confidentiality.
LSPs must implement strict security measures to avoid data breaches and keep the information provided by clients private. They must also make contracts with their translators to never disclose clients’ information to anyone and keep it to themselves. It will help an LSP have a long-lasting and trustworthy relationship with its clients.
Final Verdict!
Managing an LSP agency is quite a challenging thing to do, but with the right tools, knowledge, and people, you can easily get away with most challenges. This article talks about some most common mistakes done by language service providers and what one should do to avoid them. It will allow you to identify the problematic areas early and make timely improvements in the processes. Hopefully, the tips provided in this post will help language services providers avoid mistakes and make informed decisions to mitigate the challenges coming their way.