White Paper: Planning Your Translation Project: Crafting the perfect RFPs or RFIs to put translation providers on a level playing field (cont.)

Utilizing style guides and glossaries
Many industries have specific terminology relating to their product or service, and you may prefer a certain style or tone in your messaging. While this is commonly noted during translation and a translator will take care to reproduce a messaging style as accurately as possible, the development of a glossary or style guide before starting work will help ensure that your translation provider understands and reproduces your preferences throughout the translated material.

Setting the pace
Accurate preparation and execution of any translation project takes time. Your translation team will be made up of full-time professionals who usually work standard business hours in their time zone, and your potential translation partner can provide an ideal schedule for your project according to the project specifications. In cases where you have a pre-defined schedule, turnaround times can be adjusted by adding more resources (such as the number of translators working on your project), refining tasks (such as the level of detail in a post-translation quality assurance pass) and performing tasks in parallel (such as translating your content while your in-country reviewers’ are performing their glossary review) to meet your needs. While accelerating a project’s lifecycle can mean meeting your schedule, it can also present a greater risk for challenges down the line. Discuss the risks up front with your provider to see if steps can be taken to reduce or manage them. Just as you don’t want to deal with receiving badly done work, your potential agency does not want to provide you with material that you cannot use.

There is a spectrum of solutions to choose from for localization. At one end is a totally in-house localization operation while at the other is a completely outsourced, turnkey model using a Localization Service Provider (LSP). In-house provides maximum control while outsourced offers maximum flexibility. For the right conditions, both solutions can provide high value and high quality but which works best is a function of volume, workload stability and a company’s appetite for scaling internal teams. With enough volume, stable demand and a long-term commitment to the business model, an in-house model might be the right approach. However, low or variable needs are addressed with an outsourced model. Almost all companies will have some elements of both. Even companies with the greatest demand such as GE, Google, Microsoft and IBM outsource most of their localization. In addition to the economics of outsourcing to specialized firms, companies often cite the benefit of keeping a cost center that is outside of their core business as a flexible on-demand service.

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