Bring on the pain! When translation matters...it's too late!

You cannot change what has happened in the past. However, you can learn from it by identifying those behaviors that have both helped and hindered your company in the past. Those are lagging indicators. You can greatly benefit from understanding these behaviors and how they’ve impacted your company. You can change the future by looking at leading indicators and taking a proactive approach with the way you manage your translation. It’s never too late!

Taking a proactive approach by identifying and managing those leading indicators that have an impact on their projects can help organizations avoid the pain. However, if an organization has never felt the pain, they are less likely to find value in a proactive approach–especially when translation is not their highest priority. It is a vicious cycle that organizations have a hard time escaping.

When do multilingual communications become important enough for organizations to start investing in internal process assessment and management to gain efficiencies in the translation process?

When we introduced the Client Mentor Program™ in 2008, we realized that organizations who are managing their translation projects often do not understand how they impact the costs of their translation projects. 80 % of organizations with multilingual communications need guidance and assistance in order to mature on the Global Communications Maturity Model. These organizations view their multilingual communications as just an expense. They do not tie translation to return on investment. They will not understand the impact of an inefficient process until they feel the pains associated with a project that does not go as they expect.

We at Language Solutions have our own internal metrics defined for managing translation processes efficiently for our clients. But we can only control so much... At some point, processes on the client’s side are beyond our direct control. Our focus, therefore, is to help organizations gain control of their own internal processes. Our Global Readiness Scorecard was designed for our client’s benefit to help them evaluate their processes. We then work with them to implement metrics for improving their processes.

Process efficiency translates into cost savings and has a positive impact on timeframes and the quality of the work. All of this can be achieved if an organization understands how their internal processes that happen before and after translation impact the translation process. These are the processes that you can control….if it’s important to you.

Edited by Jeanne Granda