Handling any translation job is not a one-time task. Although with ConveyThis you can get your website translation up and going, yet there is more to do after that. That is trying to refine the translation job done to suit your brand. This takes more material and financial resources to handle.
In past articles, we have discussed the concept of enhancing the standard of automated translation. It was mentioned in the article that individuals or companies are left with the decision of picking which of the translation options of machine, manual, professional or combination of any of these they will use. If the option you are choosing is the use of human professionals for your translation project, then there is a need for team collaboration. That is to say that you don’t hire professionals and you think that is all. The diversity in firms and organizations today makes the need for having multilingual team even greater. When you engage professional translators, you will want to relate with them in the best possible manner. That is why in this article we will discuss, one after the other, four major tips for translation collaboration and also will put a touch on how best to sustain good communication throughout the translation process.
These tips are as seen below:
1. Ascertain team members’ roles:
While it may appears simple, determining each member roles is an essential step in handling and ensuring success in any translation project that involves more than one person. The translation project may not go on well if each and every member of the team is not well aware of the roles they are to play for the success of the project. Even if you will be hiring remote workers or onsite translators, outsourcing or handling it internally, you still need someone who will assume the role of a project manager in order to manage the project from start to finish.
When there is a dedicated project manager who is committed to the project, it lets the project have a high level of consistency. The project manager will also ensure that the project is ready at the allotted time frame.
2. Put guidelines in place: You can do this by employing the use of style guide (also known as manual of style) and glossary.
- Style Guide: as a team, there should be a standard guide for every member of the team. You may employ the use of your company’s style guide, otherwise known as manual of style, as the yardstick of standards that you and every member of the team must follow. This will make your project style, formatting, and manner of writing consistent and coherent. It is very easy for you to pass on the guides to others in the team including hired professional translators if you yourself already followed what is stated in the guide. With that, professional translators and other members working on the project will be able to understand the way and manner in which the original version of your website will be reflected in the language they are working on. When the style, tone and the reasons for your contents are well presented on the pages of your website in the newly added languages, visitors of your website in those languages will enjoy the same experience as visitors using the original languages.
- Glossary: there should be a glossary of words or terms that will be ‘specially’ used in the translation project. These terms will not be translated in the course of the website translation project. They advantage of having such glossary of terms is that you will not have to waste time again trying to manually edit or make adjustments to such words, terms or phrases. You can easily get these terms gathered if you use thus suggestion. The suggestion is that you create an excel sheet that you will use to ask your teammates from various department across your company the words that should not be translated. While it is necessary to leave the brand name without translation, there are other terms such as other supporting brands, names of products, as well as legal terms that will be best to remain in the original language without translating them. With getting approved glossary of terms compiled, you have the opportunity of making wise use of your time to concentrate on other important things rather than wasting them on readjusting what has already been translated and this will also relieve other members of the team of any additional stress that would have come with manually editing of such terms.
3. Set realistic project time frame: the fact that the more time spent by human professional translators on translation project the more the cost of their charges, you should set a time frame in which you believed the project can start and when it should come to an end. This will let the translators make wise use of their time and may probably have a reliable schedule that shows a breakdown of tasks they will be handling at one time or the other. However, if you will be employing machine translation to start the preliminary parts of the project, then you should be alert to how much time that will be spent of post editing.
Also, if your will be any of your company’s employee on the project you should remember that the current project is not their original work. They have other work to do alongside the translation project. Hence, you should be concerned with how much time they are going to spend assisting with the translation project.
Ensure you choose a realistic time frame for your project and as to which of the translated pages can go live as they are being translated.
- Maintaining continuous communication: to have a better and successful workflow of your translation project, it is imperative to have and maintain continuous dialogue between you and your teammates as well as with the translators too. When there is a continuous communication line, you will be able to meet your targeted goal and should there be any issue along the line of the project, it would have been resolved before it becomes additional burden at the end of the project.
Ensure that you make room for one-on-one discussion. Such sincere discussion will let everybody be at alert, conscious, committed, and have sense of belonging in the course of the project. In the absence of physical conversation or where meeting together physically will not be the best idea, virtual meetings options like zoom, slack, Google Teams and Microsoft Teams may be put in place. Such regular virtual meetings will help keep things together to work for the success of the project. Though these virtual options may best be considered in a situation where you are undertaking massive translation project for your website.
When there is constant dialogue among all that is involved in the project, you will come to notice a form of connection between members of the team will make the project go on smoothly. And when there is a need for such, it will be easy to contact one and other for help without any reservation.
The option of real-time communication also avails either the translators or other team mates to raise questions and find answers to the questions without further delay. Reviews and feedback will be easily passed across.
Without further delay, now is the time for you to start translation collaboration for your website. Website translation is not that a difficult task to handle. When you have the right people come together to form team, translation collaboration will come with little or no difficulty.
In the course of this article, it was mentioned that the diversity in firms and organizations today makes the need for having multilingual team even greater. And that when you engage professional translators, you will want to relate with them in the best possible manner. That is why this article lays emphasis on four (4) major tips for translation collaboration. It mentions that for a proper team collaboration, you should ensure that you ascertain the roles of team members, ensure guidelines are in place to serve as guide for the project, make sure you set a targeted time frame that is realistic for the project, and maintain continuous communications with the members of the team and translators. If you should try and follow these suggested four (4) major tips, you will not only witness a successful translation collaboration but also you will be able to start, sustain and maintain good communication throughout the translation process.
If you will like to enhance the standard of your translation by employing automated translation workflow, you will find it interesting to make use of ConveyThis because the process is easier by combining all of the tips that have been mentioned earlier in this articles with some other essential steps like, making orders for professional translators, ability to view translation history, ability to create and manage your personal glossary terms, availing you the opportunity of manually adding glossary rules to your dashboard and many more.
You can always start using ConveyThis with the free plan or one that best fits your need.