Perhaps during the thunderstorm isn't always the best time to buy an umbrella. Yet sometimes we still find ourselves caught in the rain, not even realizing there was a massive storm cloud rolling in. The same can be said for Translation Management Systems, as silly as it may sound - at first.
When your brand is handling a massive localization project, with ballooning costs and missed deadlines, then you might have waited too long to leverage a Translation Management System. But, it can be difficult to recognize the proper warning signs without a full understanding of the landscape.
That's why we want to offer some insight into the three major warning signs that indicate you might have waited too long to buy a TMS.
Traditional translation workflows have been the same for quite some time. Businesses generally source a Language Service Provider (LSP), and indirectly provide translators with a spreadsheet of content, usually relying on the LSP as a middle-man.
With Smartling, content will always flow through the system and end up where it needs to be, reaching the market 50% faster thanks to a reduction in time spent on project management.
That means your beautiful and engaging user content is converted into a dull and lifeless excel spreadsheet, where translators plug away and translate your highly branded content without any context into the user experience.
Content is then emailed back to you, and developers have to copy and paste that content into their existing Content Management System while hoping it will all fit and the experience will still work as expected.
Sometimes things are even worse, and organizations rely on bilingual employees to translate content, eating up time that should be spent on other business-critical tasks.
With powerful automation, Smartling's Translation Management System enables brands to save time, estimate costs, collaborate with translators and simplify the entire process:
At the end of the day, relying on a manual process for translation is time-consuming, costly, and error-prone. Powerful automation keeps content moving, and enables brands to ensure quality goals are always met.
Relying on the traditional process of emailing spreadsheets back and forth leaves your organization blind, missing out on critical data that can help drive the right decisions, and costing you more time and money in the long run.
Smartling enables brands to capture a bird's eye view of the entire content supply chain. You can understand precisely which parts of your translation process are slowing down time-to-market, without adding to translation quality.
Instead, Smartling’s TMS tracks every single click and every step of the translation process. Some key metrics that platforms like Smartling can track include:
Smartling even provides businesses with a bird's eye view of the entire content supply chain with our workflow reports. You can understand precisely which parts of your translation process are slowing down time-to-market, without adding to translation quality.
Without a TMS tracking every single click, your organization is blindly making decisions, potentially wasting both time and money.
Translation should never happen in a black box. Instead, the translation process should be collaborative, and transparent.
Smartling provides a powerful combination of transparency and collaboration with translators, enabling brands to work directly with their professional translators for the best possible outcome.
Translators are an extension of your team, and their creativity is what will help fuel the success of your brand's experience in a new language. That’s why Smartling strives to connect brands with directly with their translators, we have one common goal in mind: to help you move the world with words.
To combat this black box approach, Smartling provides a powerful combination of transparency and collaboration with translators, enabling brands to work directly with their professional translators for the best possible outcome.
There are so many questions that translators will want to ask to better understand the intent and meaning of content -- for example the target audience, the goal of the content, and the overall feel -- to best capture that message. Therefore, collaboration with your translator is crucial to successful translations.
Is your brand still stuck in the early days of translation management: emailing content without any visual context, zero data to quantify the process, and no way to collaborate with translators? We hear a different story with the same theme every day -- content must be translated, but there is no clear path forward.
Along with our list of ten ways to know that your brand is ready for a TMS, we want to help your business determine whether or not it's time for a new solution.
Think you're ready, and want to learn more? Schedule a meeting with a translation and Smartling expert today.
Matt Grech is the Content Marketing Manager at Smartling, responsible for growing Smartling awareness and brand content. As a digital content writer, Matt applies his journalistic lens to content, helping users deepen their understanding of the brand, services and technology provided by Smartling. Matt has previously contributed to an industry leading Unified Communications resource, as well as local newspapers where he developed his unique ability to investigate, interview, and transform complex problems into simple solutions.