The title of this blog may lead you to believe that the following content will be totally academic, and to an extent it will be, but I am writing this blog for the large number of people that have emailed me letting me know that they wish to learn more about the translation process in the real world environment.
Translation businesses used to be the highway that content travelled through to get from customer to linguist and then back again. If the highways of yesterday looked like Route 60 across America, then today they would look more like a bowl of spaghetti.
Content is now derived from many different sources and arrives in hundreds of files formats. For example, a large client of ours that is using a content and document management system to handle their written copy for both printed collateral and website materials would integrate with thebigword API so that content being written in English can be automatically sent to thebigword for translation.
Once these files are received they are often in a range of file formats such as XML, HTML or InDesign etc. Our automated workflow system will immediately pick these files up and protect the tags and code that should not be translated or altered. The automated system will independently recognise the source language which will be preset with the requested target languages. Then, without human interaction, the system will farm out the work to waiting approved linguists, but not before scanning the content through terminology glossaries, translations tools and some in cases machine translation software.
This process is then reversed so that within minutes and hours after our client has created content in their own language as if by magic it will reappear in their system translated into all the requested languages.
The above example is an extremely simple workflow and more often than not they are more complex and will include review phases along with many other stages. thebigword’s workflow automation system has 60 different processes that can be included or excluded and can create a standardised 3,600 different workflows. You may be thinking, ‘What happens when the automation breaks down?’ We’ve planned for that to as well as we have over 300 operational staff including a global team of Project Managers who are constantly monitoring each clients workflow via a highly available management dashboard that highlights any areas of risk and issues.
Our Project Managers can see everything from where the document is in the workflow process to how many words have been translated and therefore can pre-empt issues and remedy them before they delay and jeopardise deadlines.
If we didn’t have the technology and human resource expertise in place, not only would the cost of translating content dramatically increase but so would quality issues and other errors. Businesses and individuals are generating more content in one week than they wrote in one year in the 80’s. This is a trend that we expect to see continue for a long time to come and therefore the importance of costs effective translation is absolutely vital and in most cases can only be achieved by the automation of processes in a predetermined workflow.
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