In-house or external?

In the end, it comes down to one big question: Should we manage translations in-house or have the translation work done by one or several language service providers? In-house translation is considered to be “the hard way”. At SMA Solar Technology AG in-house translation management is also considered the better way. SMA decided to base its massive international activities on an internal language service department. Starting as a one-man show in 1998, SMA’s language service department eventually became a team consisting of eight in-house translators and project managers who interact with 30 freelance translators and ten translation agencies. In-house translation capacities are used for taking care of the most demanding projects in terms of language and deadline. The projects with plenty of fuzzy matches are assigned to freelancers and paid on an hourly basis. The rest of the projects are done by one of the language service providers.

Here is why SMA chose the in-house approach: In-house translation management is the core of any effective internationalization. The knowledge of the enterprise, the Translation Memory, remains in the company and the in-house language service department provides optimal translations in terms of quality, speed and costs. The internal language service team is the core of the quality management regarding language issues of the entire company. In the end the business is highly effective due to perfect communication. Thus the development of a new market in a new country is a reproducible process that can be kicked off in a matter of minutes. This is, of course, just an image of the ideal situation, which we might never quite reach, but which we will keep working towards day after day.  But how do we get there?

Communication, terminology, centralization and standardization

Communication
Everybody in the translation and localization business is constantly communicating with vendors, clients and anybody else involved in the process. The key is to establish an effective communication that is limited to the essential contents and can rely on the elimination of senseless emails that could or should have been already answered at the beginning. Once the communication is organized, the translators can concentrate on real language work instead of hunting for the correct accounting code for a project that was already delivered four weeks ago. Remember, you don’t want to eliminate communication, but aim for effective communication. Perfect communication will never be achieved but there are a few things the SMA language service does in order to get close:

Provide as much information as possible. This might sound like a step towards ineffective communication. But if you give as much information as possible, the recipient can decide for himself if he needs it or not. At SMA this means that in the optimal case all kinds of data is embedded into every translation. This includes the target group of the text, the accounting code, flexibility of the deadline all the way to the respective contact people, including the time zone they are located in. Some of this information might not be needed, but in case it is, it is available: Nobody will have to ask for it in a separate email.

Make sure staff receives feedback. SMA’s language service established a standardized Feedback Management as a dedicated process where feedback is actively obtained from the in-house client, processed and evaluated and finally passed on to the people who are in charge of providing the service. In perfect times, feedback is processed and passed on for every (major) project. In days of project overload, at least the very major projects undergo the feedback process and all translators receive corresponding feedback at least every eight weeks. All findings are used for the improvement of the processes and communication. After all everybody involved in the translation business will agree to the following: Feedback is the only way to improve any language service.

Terminology
Straighten out your terminology. When talking about language service at SMA people often ask: “When did you start with terminology work?”. The answer is simple and devastating: “Way too late.” It is the result of the belief that one can save time by doing the terminology later. You cannot. SMA’s terrific growth in the past ten years brought on quite a number of new translation projects, an estimated 15,000. And, clear terminology work was not really followed up the way it should have been. Today terminology at SMA consists of one terminologist and two temporary workers, and the first results are kicking in.

Centralization
Centralize your services and systems. Put things right where people can see them: At SMA we deployed the Across Language Server for processing all translations, managing terminology and even checking the source language. The system is connected to all major content management systems for documentation or product information and even the ERP system SAP. In theory all relevant information (TM information) is therefore available from one source. Turning this theory into reality is our daily job. Right now at SMA four systems can (semi-)automatically launch translation projects and absorb the translations when they are completed. In the end we concentrate on the language work instead of shifting around files a dozen times before we even begin. Overall, we see the attractive benefits of any type of automation: We increase speed, we reduce costs and above all, we eliminate brainless overhead and have people concentrate on the important part – real language work.

Standardization
Although every project is unique, we try to standardize project families. Every project moves through a chain of jobs where every job complies with a certain kind of standard job family. At SMA we were able to identify twelve different types of projects, each following a well-defined chain of up to 14 jobs. Simple translation projects consist of “Translate” and “Proofread” – demanding projects would be processed by a full blown assembly of jobs such as “Format check and cleanup”, “Terminology Repair”, “Translation” and “Proofread” all the way to “Full DTP of the target file”. The jobs themselves are practically identical and result in the possibility to apply a fire-and-forget strategy for nearly 80 percent of the projects we encounter in our daily work at SMA.

Clean up the source
Let’s face it , only a good source text will end up being a well-translated text. No matter how hard you try, you will never be able to straighten out a poor source text in the translation. Therefore, at SMA we try to keep in mind that any work we invest in the source text will show an even more attractive ROI in the translation project.

Role Hopping at SMA

A translation department is subject to fluctuating workloads. Therefore, we assigned dual roles for the employees at SMA: With only a few exceptions, everybody in the department is an in-house translator (in the calm days) and shifts to being a project manager taking care of external suppliers (in the wild days). This allows us to keep everybody busy and above all, the project managers know what they are talking about when they discuss projects with external suppliers. The “in-house” to “outsource” ratio can easily shift from 70 to 10 percent when the situation requires it.

Conclusion

In-house translation management seems quite simple. Talking about it is easy, but doing it is hard. However, when things work well, it is also fun. And that’s your reward. When things don’t work well, its time to improve. And while you are on the road to improvement, remember the saying: “The journey is its own reward.”

The ten translation commandments at SMA

1. Complete difficult work in-house, projects with high fuzzy match values with a freelancer paid by the hour and the rest with a LSP
2. Communicate. Embed into your projects all the information you have. Let all people involved know what is going on. They want to know.
3. Put your Translation Memory tool at the center of all processes that have to do with language. That’s where it belongs.
4. Keep your team flexible – Only a translator can really talk with a translator.
5. Feedback, feedback, feedback. The only way to improve.
6. Standardize your projects. A standardized project costs half the money.
7. Pure wordcount is an antique way to compensate a creative translator. Pay a bonus to the freelancer when a job went well. This will bring more than it will cost.
8. Start at the source. Effective communication is only possible with powerful communication in the source language.
9. Terminology. Just do it. You will not get anywhere without it.
10. Improve your processes. Every day.