Translation Management Strategy

Does your organization have a translation management strategy? Many organizations rely on their LSP (Language Service Provider) to effectively manage their translation projects. However, there is only so much efficiency that can be managed on the LSP side. Are people within your organization aware of how they impact the overall costs? Does your LSP make this visible to you and mentor you to achieve efficiencies in your own processes so that you can not only affect your costs but also the quality of your communications? Would your organization take advantage of this if it were available?

Many organizations that we work with are in the 80th percentile of companies on the GCMM. Many of these organizations won't realize the value of efficiencies until they are in the High Risk stage of which overspending is a common symptom. It is the overspending that causes them to finally understand the pain and consider the value of efficiencies. At this point though, organizations cannot go back and change what has happened to get them to this point.

Our approach is to be proactive early on and help mentor organizations throughout their stages of maturity. However, we have found that until an organization experiences the "pain" associated with the High Risk stage, it is very difficult to get them to be proactive early on. So what causes you to take that proactive stance in your organization? Perhaps it is an opportunity to bring a new strategy to upper management. Perhaps it is an opportunity to be able to defend the budget that you are asking for....

At LSI, we have metrics defined in 4 areas that we assess for a client's own translation management strategy. It is not necessary for a client to implement all the metrics in the 4 areas that we assess but rather focus on the 1 area in which they can gain success. Each area has 4-6 metrics with an action plan for continuous improvement and for measurement. If your organization has a quality management system, we can help you to interpret that data as well that you are already tracking and add our metrics to yours. It might be a strategy for the new year that you can implement!