How to evaluate your buying decisions? - Conscious Stage

Conscious Stage 
Organizations at this stage are just beginning to realize all that is involved in multilingual communications. The Conscious stage is still very project driven, but projects become more repeatable and cost awareness is growing. Organizations are testing out new markets.

Below is an overview of the Conscious Stage compared to the other reactive stages:
 

How do I protect my brand identity in foreign markets?
It's normal at this stage that organizations try to go through local affiliates (this could be your distributor, employee within a local office, etc.) for basic translation needs as local affiliates know the needs of the audience, are knowledgeable of the subject and provide a low cost option over a translation vendor. However, local affiliates usually lack time to translate materials on time and brand consistency is often a concern.

It's a challenge to control brand messaging and design standards over different local affiliates. Each have their own processes, resources and insights. We have seen with organizations in this stage, that decentralized efforts usually end up in dissatisfaction because decisions made at the local level do not align with the organization's expectations.

We find that the centralization effort is one of the first major efforts or organizations to think about process improvements in . Local affiliates are very useful in the process, but management of content and design needs to be controlled.

What can I expect from my vendor at this stage?
Aside from managing dedicated subject matter experts in client specific teams, in the case of centralization, your translation vendor should be the catalyst for process improvement. Translation becomes a cycle of content management, terminology and translation management and review management where the translation vendor can play a central role.

Also Read: Global Readiness Audit; It's our assessment model to assess the organization's needs for process improvement efforts that make the most impact at each stage of maturity.

Process management becomes a problem and a vendor should be able to control the process from release through translation, review and final product. Also, each step is managed so that the brand messaging is protected. There is an important role to play in understanding what could hurt the brand and how it should be managed from a design and terminology perspective. Vendors should be empowered with this information in order to manage and vendors should have excellent control over review processes with local affiliates and understand the dynamics at play.

Readiness Categories as it relates to
management levels in the organization

Also, a vendor should help to start you on the path of standardization. Style guides are very useful at this stage to define what elements are part of the global brand vs. what elements are local and how they should be implemented consistently. Organizations should rely on their translation vendor to have a process in place and to suggest process improvements. We have defined clear objectives and processes in our Language and Design Readiness Categories that are directly applicable to this stage of growth.

What input can I deliver in collaboration with my translation vendor to contribute to a positive outcome?
In earlier blog posts, we've written that it is important to protect the brand messaging. Translation is almost becoming a threat to brand consistency if not managed well. With your trust that your vendor will handle the management of the translation process, a successful outcome cannot be achieved without a clear understanding of the brand and brand messaging. Collaboration early on is essential to establish an understanding of the organization's goals and desired outcomes. Also, management of people and expectations need to be communicated from the organization to all parties. Too often have we seen that organizations who cannot commit to the process end up back to managing decentralized efforts, or at least, growing cost inefficiencies.

What processes do I optimize at this stage?
Considering that your translation vendor is trusted with most of the translation management, there are still processes that the organization can start to work on. In the Language and Design categories, we work to optimize the content and design creation process and make sure that the output is optimized for translation as well. Organizations should focus on small efforts with their writing staff and design team to plan projects ahead and standardize the output for translation.

Global style guides are also a good start as well as Translation and Terminology management together with Corporate Glossaries. This is an asset building exercise that requires input from the organization as well.

What are my risks?
Also Read: Case Study: How low cost purchasing decisions come back with a bite. This case study fits well with organizations at the Conscious level who manage repeatable projects.

Here are some of the risk factors we identified at this stage:

Risk factors in Conscious Stage

Consider that at this stage, your commitment to translation is growing. Translation work can quickly take its own path without any consideration for your brand or product. Consider that your brand is worth protecting as it is the brand and quality of work that brought you this potential. By taking care of your brand at this stage with a dedicated translation vendor that can manage your centralization efforts early on and by supporting the process as much as possible, the risks at this stage can be mitigated.



Our experience with the localization maturity model

Our Global Communication Maturity Model - like the Localization Maturity Model (LMM) - shows a natural evolution of maturity of a buyer. We know that this growth will only happen if translation services become of an increasingly important strategic factor for growth.



Global Communications Maturity Model

Our research was predicated on the industry assessment that many organizations tend to overspend on translations as they grow. There is a clear opportunity for LSPs to provide additional customer service by focusing on 80% of translation buyers that are at the beginning 4 stages of maturity in the maturity model.

Why buyers fail to move up the maturity level
In our experience, these are some of the leading factors within the buying organization:

• Lack of organizational support (translation is not deemed important enough)
• Lack of time (inadequate job responsibility; no dedicated localization manager in house; unrealistic deadlines)
• Lack of understanding (no insight into the cause/effect of their own processes on the translation process)
• Lack of information sharing (buyer/vendor relationship structure; lack of proper follow-up

Without any intervention in this growth process, a buyer can lose its control over the costs of translation. (Tweet this!)

How LSPs fail to help buyers move up the maturity level
Barriers for LSPs to help buyers:

• Lack of process (documented process to identify, analyze and implement process improvements on the buyer's side)
• Lack of understanding of client process, goals and objectives (relationship)
• Lack of vision (too much focus on the translation process)

These barriers are not easy to overcome, but they are necessary to maintain a relationship with their client as they grow into the next stage of maturity.

How LSPs can help buyers move up the maturity level

A collaborative effort between buyer and LSP, especially at the early stages of maturity, is essential to meaningful improvements (Tweet this!). This is where the balanced scorecard approach is an excellent tool to establish goals and objectives that not only address our responsibilities, but also looks at the buyer's responsibility to protect their goals and objectives in their own processes.

An LSP can help a buyer by reminding them of the impact of changing requirements and at the same time providing them with insight into improvements that are meaningful to the goals and objectives that the client has.

The ideal approach:

1. Assessment of Maturity - We have developed an assessment tool (Global Communication Readiness Assessment) for buyers to get an understanding of their level of maturity. This tool is a great way to introduce buyers into thinking about their own processes and how it affects their outcomes
2. Understanding Need - SWOT analysis - A documented approach to understand the goals and objectives of the buyer and find the gaps through a SWOT analysis.
3. Discovery and Findings - In a collaborative effort, turn findings into priorities that you agree to work on.  
4. Balanced Scorecard approach - An outcomes based agreement between the buyer and us establishes meaningful goals and objectives that are aligned with the findings of the SWOT analysis. Metrics are defined to measure the progress of each of these goals.
5. Reporting on progress and continuous improvement - A quarterly report keeps track of progress and forms the basis of continuous improvement (see the Balanced Scorecard example).

But even when there is no time for this ideal approach, an LSP should be able to adapt and work on process improvements. The GCMM or Localization Maturity Model is an important asset to any LSP to continuously look for opportunities to extend their knowledge to the buyer in order to help them move.

We'll look more into that assessment tool for LSPs in following posts.

Language Solutions is ISO certified

Language Solutions has received ISO 9001:2008 Quality Management Certification from BSI International Registrars.

We started working on ISO Certification in late January and managed to get our Quality Manual documented and successfully completed both of our planned audits with BSI (Stage I and Stage II) by August.

Download our Certificate

We were particularly successful with ISO certification because we've listened to the requirements from the ISO standard and let our processes (that were driven by customer requirements, innovation and through industry best practices) lead us to achieving the requirements rather than the other way around. During the audit it became apparent to the auditor that we had created a system of processes that is effective and fits with the needs of our clients.

The culture of Quality Management and Quality Excellence was already ingrained in our organization. During our test phase we learned that 80% of the ISO requirements were already met when we started and we made further improvements to our process to ensure that we met all of the requirements. The mindset of quality management and continuous process improvement was shaped by our involvement in Baldrige Performance Excellence and provided us with better understanding how ISO could be beneficial to our organization. ISO gave us new tools to use in our quest for performance excellence and is playing an active role in the every day management of the organization.


Implementation of ISO can be a daunting task, but it can be very rewarding if approached with the intent to make the organization better. We believe that ISO is an important addition to the success of our organization. The ISO certification is just the start. We plan to continuously review our Quality Management System against the requirements of our customers using the ISO standard and Baldrige Best Practices in our management toolkit.

Global Readiness Audit

A self-assessment audit for your global communication needs can be a valuable tool to determine your current situation, to set goals and to find areas of improvement that have the most impact. However, most assessment tools that we have seen provide solutions but do not focus on the leading indicators that impact your localization practices.

There are Language Service Providers (LSP's) that can help you determine your needs for global communications and most likely they promote the use of technology through their audits. Tools like Translation Memory Management, Terminology Management, Source Authoring are all good tools to improve the efficiency of your localization practices, but do not provide all the answers. Most Language Service Providers can take care of translation management using these tools. However, the success of each project is limited by their own Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and how they manage their own processes.

Our approach does not only look at our internal Key Performance Indicators for translation management, but also assesses how a client's processes can positively influence or negatively impact the localization process. Those are the leading indicators that a client can influence in order to improve quality and time-to-market at lower costs.

Most audits do not take into account that every organization is at a different stage of maturity and need scalable solutions. Even if you are a large company, your global communication needs currently might not be comprehensive enough to invest in large scale technologies like a full scale Source Authoring system or Content Management System. Technology is not the only answer for organizations to influence the quality of their global communication needs. You need to look at people and processes that have a direct impact on the localization processes.

The global communications process can be time consuming which is why most organizations outsource to a Language Service Provider. Some of these Providers have the resources and processes in place to effectively manage your translation process and keep that burden from your internal resources who have their own work to do. However, the impact that your internal resources have to affect the localization process should not be ignored. We promote involvement of people in all levels of your organization to find efficiencies in their own processes that have a positive impact on localization.

Our audit focuses on internal resources at all levels of the organization to determine how they can help improve their own processes to aid translation management on the client side. We identified 4 areas of assessment (Strategic, Organizational, Content and Language & Design) and identified roles within those areas that directly impact the global communications process. The assessment promotes each individual in the organization to contribute to the globalization process without having to step outside of their own responsibilities.

Contact us for our Global Readiness Audit. We are taking the next step for organizations at any maturity level to identify areas of improvement that yield the highest results.