FIVE REASONS YOU SHOULD WORK

WITH AN LSP

BY GISEL OLIVARES

INTRODUCTION

There are a few ways to get a translation.

Have personnel in your company do the

translation

Look for a freelance translator.

Use a machine translation like Google Translate.

Send the job to an LSP.

WHAT IS AN LSP?An LSP is a company that manages translation projects by:

o Receiving an order

o Calculating the cost

o Finding translators

o Managing the translation process

o Ensuring translation quality

o Delivering the translation to the customer

o And finally, paying the translators

Every situation is different but here are five reasons that an LSP might be best for your

translation project.

#1 - A POOL OF DEPENDABLE TRANSLATORS

An LSP has a long-term relationship with dependable freelancers.

If you want to find freelancers for yourself, you have to wade through thousands of

resumes.

You must weed out unqualified candidates while, at the same time, trying to avoid

fake resumes and scammers.

Finding a good freelancer can take hours, which you could be spending doing what

you do best.

An LSP, on the other hand, has already gone through the process of finding

dependable translators.

DEPENDABLE

TRANSLATORS

CONTINUED…

A good LSP keeps careful records of translators’ strengths and weaknesses in order to match them with appropriate projects

They rate them on accuracy, speed, expertise and other metrics

The LSP can have a high degree of confidence in its linguists

FIELD EXPERTS

An LSP is better prepared to deal with contingencies than you are on your own.

Imagine this: You need to have a document about telescope mirrors translated into

German by an expert. You find a German translator, who is an expert on telescopes.

In the middle of your project, that translator breaks his or her wrist. Where does

that leave your project? Will you be able to find another dependable German

translator who knows about telescope mirrors?

An LSP has relationships with multiple translators that are experts in their fields and

that can step in to take a project in case of an accident. So if you hire an LSP, instead

of getting just a freelance translator, you are also getting a risk management solution.

#2 - NO NEED TO ACQUIRE SPECIALIZED TOOLS

An LSP will have already purchased all of the specialized software necessary for

translation project management.

However, for large projects and for an effective long-term localization strategy,

numerous tools streamline the process and safeguard quality.

One example is a translation project management software, such as Plunet.

After you start to work on a few projects and a few translators, you need a robust

business management suite to effectively and efficiently deal with contact

management, quote generation, invoicing, queries, and reporting.

An LSP already has systems to coordinate the complex business of translation.

NO NEED FOR SPECIALIZED TOOLS CONTINUED…

Another necessary tool is a translation environment

called a computer-aided translation (CAT) tool, such

as memoQ, or Memsource.

They lower costs, increase speed and improve accuracy

by remembering all previous translations and offering

suggestions for current translations.

CAT tools have advanced quality assurance functionality

to check for common errors.

Changes made by translators instantly sync with the

server sentence by sentence.

LSPs also maintain tools to help their clients

communicate with the translators, such as Smartsheet.

#3 - QUALITY ASSURANCE

LSPs can offer quality assurance and review.

A good LSP can ensure that you receive high-quality translations.

Project managers review all translations before delivery to check for common errors,

such as extra spaces, or mismatching numbers.

The text can be sent to a second translator to review for accuracy.

This review focuses on potential linguistic errors in the text.

After a review by a second translator, you can be confident that your “Ich bin ein

Berliner” doesn’t mean “I am a jelly doughnut.”

#4 - IMPROVE CONSISTENCY

LSPs create and maintain term bases and translation memories.

A term base is basically a list of words in the source language with the appropriate translations of those words in the target language.

This is especially useful for names of products and other company-specific words.

This tool ensures linguistic accuracy and consistency.

Not only can the term base tell the translator what words to use, it can also tell the translator what words not to use.

For example, languages frequently have two words that have the same meaning–a transliteration from another language as well as a more formal translation.

IMPROVE CONSISTENCY CONTINUED…

Translation memory records how every sentence has been translated in the past.

If a sentence in the current document is identical to a sentence in a document already translated, the previous translation will be automatically inserted.

If the sentence is similar, the translator may need to change only a few words.

Translation memory leads to a huge increase not only in speed but also consistency.

In the future, any given source sentence in the documentation about a particular project will always be translated the same way.

#5 - SAVE $$$

Translation memory especially shows its worth with software documentation.

If a company translates documentation for version 1.1, the LSP will create a new

translation memory and enter all of the translation pairs into it.

Then when the documentation for version 1.2 comes out and is only 15 percent

different from that of version 1.1, the LSP will then use the translation memory to

automatically pre-translate the 85 percent of the documentation that has been

translated before.

As a result, the software company will pay for only the 15 percent that was different

from the previous version.

SAVE $$$ CONTINUED…

Further, if out of that 15 percent, 10 percent is similar to text that was in version 1.1,

the software company will get a discount for that text, so it ends up paying full price

for only 5 percent of the documentation of version 1.2.

Imagine how much the company will save by the time it reaches version 20!

Clearly, term bases and translation memories are essential for large scale and long

term translation.

An LSP will maintain these resources for you, leading to more and more savings as the

time goes on while at the same time keeping the language consistent.

A SINGLE POINT OF CONTACT = TIME SAVINGS

Finally, an LSP is your single of point of contact

for all of your translation needs.

If you hire 10 different translators to translate a

message into 10 different languages, imagine how

many emails you will have to send and receive?

How many people will you have to contact and

negotiate with?

And how many project milestones will you have

to keep track of?

How many invoices will you have to process?

AN LSP SIMPLIFIES SO MUCH…

If you make use of an LSP, all of that legwork is completed by one person—a project

manager—who is accountable to one person—you.

The project manager at the LSP will analyze all of the documents, contact all of the

translators, set up communication between them and the experts at your company,

check up on the progress on all the jobs, perform quality assurance, and the list goes

on.

Those are all things you don’t have to do.

FINAL WORDS…

It is best if engineers stick to engineering rather than emailing translators or if

marketing teams stick to marketing instead of searching for freelancers or if

developers stick to development rather than examining thousands of words in a

foreign language for potential errors.

Your company could see significant savings if you hire an LSP instead of managing the

project on your own.

IVANNOVATION, LLC is a premier translation and localization provider of user interface,

documentation,

and marketing materials for the IT, software

development, and manufacturing industries.

Get a free quote for your project.

Phone: (864) 735-8425

www.ivannovation.com

This slide deck was adapted from an article on our blog.