Our world is innately fueled by connections. Connections between people, connections between places, and connections to entirely new ideas. The modern digital age that we find ourselves in has also ushered in a new age of global connectivity. For brands, that means reaching an entirely new audience, sometimes in an entirely new language.
At Smartling, we are obsessed with enabling brands to connect with an entirely new audience. Our success depends on your success, and we know that the right translation software is paramount to any digital transformation.
We don't like to brag, but Smartling has been named the number one Translation Management System twice in just the past year. We are considered the #1 Market Leader by CSA Research in their 2019 TMS Market Flex, as well as the #1 Market Leader according to customers on G2. Simply put, localization leaders love Smartling.
And that's for good reason. Our uniquely powerful trio of technology, language services, and ongoing professional services can be summed up as what we consider the “Smartling Advantage.”
If you're wondering whether or not Smartling is the right translation management system to help your brand move the world with words, then look no further.
Not Just Another Translation Management System
Smartling isn't a technology company, Smartling is more than that. In fact, Smartling's cloud translation management system and powerful CAT tool are just one combined aspect of what makes us stand out from the rest.
There are several unique differentiators that help Smartling stand out. Powerful TMS features like our Visual Context and Dynamic Workflows help both translators and businesses save time, and ultimately money.
Our integrations with existing CMS platforms, or an agile translation proxy, make it easy for Smartling to work alongside your brand's existing process. And yet, that still doesn't tell the full story.
Smartling provides brands with this technology, and more importantly, the services that they need to translate content for a global reach.
This unique, and powerful, combination of a modern cloud based translation management system, with the best rockstar translators in the industry, has helped set the stage for Smartling as the leader in the industry.
Smartling's Technology Advantage
Smartling has always been leading the way with the latest technology. With powerful artificial intelligence, automation and Machine Learning embedded into the foundation of our translation management system, Smartling enables both rapid and quality translation with unparalleled accuracy and consistency.
1. Two Ways to Deliver Content
Translation Proxy - Smartling's Global Delivery Network is the fastest way to launch your website or web application in any language without having to build a localization infrastructure (that's what we did for you!). It has a 99.99% uptime. It's easy to set up. Developers rejoice: the GDN requires minimal IT involvement and configuration, making it the perfect solution for companies that don't want to pull developers off of their primary projects to support localization. The GDN sits seamlessly between your website and the end-user. They won't know it's there (the GDN is very very fast), and the content they consume will be in their language.
Robust Connectors - For those looking to get a little more involved, Smartling also offers a complete set of APIs for several existing Content Management Systems, Marketing Automation platforms, E-Commerce systems and more. Brands can easily integrate Smartling with their existing solution stack, and scale translation projects into marketing efforts across the globe.
2. Visual Context
With Visual Context, Smartling has introduced a new translation workflow paradigm. Without clear context of what they are working on, translators are missing out on important factors that will help determine the best translation path to take, like existing design limitations, or tone and feeling expressed through elements beyond the text itself.
Instead, when working in Smartling, translators have a direct view of the content they are working on, and exactly how their translations will impact that design in real-time. This helps set Smartling's translation management solution apart from the competition.
As translators begin their work and input translations, Smartling will auto-generate those translations within the existing design. Overall, Visual Context removes a lot of guesswork on the translator's side, enabling more accurately localized content.
Brands can automate the visual context process by leveraging Smartling's Context Capture Library. By embedding this JavaScript library directly onto your webpages, Smartling automatically receive HTML snapshots of the current page state, and assign these snapshots to the associated project. These snapshots trigger to update every time the web page is rendered in a browser, or when the page's UI is updated from any user interactions.
Essentially, Smartling ensures that associated projects always have the most up to date version of context ready to go. This becomes even more automated when leveraging the Global Delivery Network -- visual context is already built into the process to ensure the most up-to-date context for translators.
3. Powerful Automation Features
Smartling makes project management a breeze. Our translation management system enables an entirely automated process surrounding the actual work involved in translation itself.
Project management will become a breeze, and translators will always have new content ready and waiting for their creativity to take hold.
- Project management automation, for example, enables managers to auto-assign jobs, and ensure content always ends up where it needs to be without any human interaction. With automation, translators will have the correct jobs assigned to them automatically, and the content will keep moving through to the next step of the process as soon as they complete their work.
- Automated quality checks can be put in place to help ensure that content is as polished as it needs to be before hitting the next step in the process. Depending on the level of priority set, these quality checks can simply serve as a reminder to translators, or can even be set to prevent translators from completing their work without fixing any errors.
- Dynamic Workflows enable users to completely customize and configure their unique workflows to simplify the process however they best see fit. For example, users can configure a workflow to move content depending on a determined quality score. If content passes the threshold, it can skip the internal review processes. But, if the content falls below this threshold, the workflow will assign that content to an appropriate translator to edit the segment.
4. KPI tracking and Reporting
One centralized database for all of your translations, no matter what type of content they might be, enables users to track and monitor every single step of every single translation project.
For example, our Quality Confidence Score leverages our unique algorithm to compute hundreds of data points related to translation quality so you can better understand exactly how each aspect contributes to the overall quality of translation. Not to mention, it's the industry's first predictive, machine learning-powered measure of translation quality.
Smartling also enables your brand to measure and track just about every step of the process to understand how your workflows add to the quality and speed of project completion. Other metrics to track include cost estimates and cost savings to determine the overall return on investment.
Smartling Language Services
Smartling is not your typical translation agency where brands may never know their translators. Instead, Smartling prides itself in connecting you directly with translators who customers know well.
We regularly profile translators to find the best match for each business, and enable direct collaboration between content creators and translators.
1. Rockstar Translators
Smartling's language translation service enables global businesses to deliver high-quality content with a data-driven quality and time frame service level agreement.
Our Resource vetting program qualifies under 5% of applicants to translate content for customers -- we're searching for the rockstar translators that can help your brand move the world with words. These translators are tenured and trusted resources who are 100% native speakers.
In fact, in 2018, 98% of content was delivered by Smartling translators on time, and 98% of words translated were unchanged by customers after Smartling translation.
2. Know your translators
Translators should not look like this: spanish-clientname@gmail.com. Instead, you should know your translators. There should be transparency throughout the entire process, so you know what's happening, and why.
Translators do all of their work right within the Smartling platform, enabling your brand to evaluate individual translator performance and manage quality at every step.
Users can leverage data-driven reports to better manage the on-time delivery of translations, as well as the overall quality of the work that's being done. We even go as far as providing your brand with enterprise-grade SLAs, with money-back guarantees, just in case.
3. Communicate and Collaborate
Our platform makes it easy and simple for your brand to connect and collaborate with translators. These rock stars are another member of your team, helping your brand vision come to life in a new language, with a voice that feels familiar to these new audiences.
The best way to ensure translators understand your mission is to communicate. Smartling lets users collaborate with their translators through Slack, opening a portal for ideas to spark, and relationships to thrive.
Flexibility and Growth
No localization manager? No Problem. Your success is our priority, so our people deliver world-class support and services so that you can focus on everything else.
Our Managed Services act as an extension of your team, guiding project management, vendor management, custom training, budget management and issue routing.
1. Developer Light
Our solution architects know everything there is to know about Smartling, so your business doesn't even need developers to start translating content, and reaching new audiences. We can handle the heavy lifting.
This includes website proxy configuration, technical solutioning for every integration or even custom advanced configuration for your unique and complex environments. We can also help with custom scripts or rules as well as any rewrites that need to occur, CMS integration, and can even provide an overall translation health check-up.
2. We Cover Maintenance, Too
Anticipate challenges ahead of time and design a game plan to tackle them successfully. For complex websites with highly dynamic content, a dedicated Solution Architect will maintain your custom integration and ensure code releases run smoothly. We will even maintain your Smartling connectors as your CMS environment evolves.
3. Custom Training Packages
Accelerate implementations to achieve deadlines. Learning how to use a new platform, and successfully leverage all it has to offer, can seem like a daunting task.
But it doesn't have to be that way. Our white glove service makes onboarding and ongoing training as simple as can be. Onboard new team members, or get a deep dive into a particular part of the Smartling platform.
Do More With Less
Smartling's cloud based translation management system enables you to automate, manage, and professionally translate content at an entirely new pace and with unparalleled clarity throughout the entire process. We support brands at every step, as we strive to help you move the world with words.
Our technology is proven as the clear industry-leading solution, and our professional and language services provide your organization with a complete platform unlike any other. That's what we mean when we talk about the Smartling Advantage.
If you want to dig even deeper, check out our comparison page which stacks Smartling against some other popular options.
