How Moore Global expanded its translation capacity with Redokun

Contents

"Translating resources with Redokun is much quicker and easier than other solutions we've tried, especially with the collaborative web editor."

Korena Xie

Head of Assurance Methodology

Moore Global, founded in London over 110 years ago, has grown into one of the world’s top accounting networks. Today, the network is made up of over 37,000 professionals who work together across 228 independent firms in 114 countries.

With such a large global network, it’s important for the Moore Global network and its clients to be positioned as an organization capable of delivering high quality services in many languages. Thus, Moore Global took the initiative to make sure that their resources and training could be accessed by as many members of their global community as possible.

But, this initiative came with its own set of challenges in establishing an efficient translation process — especially for translating every accountant’s favorite weapon of choice, Microsoft Excel.

The problem

Lack of language resources

Korena Xie, Head of Assurance Methodology, explains that Moore Global was already translating its resources into languages other than English with some consistency.

While training materials are primarily created using PowerPoint and Word files, many of their templates and toolkits are in Excel. These resources, originally produced in English, enable colleagues in local firms to use them for internal training and daily audit activities in their native languages.

“This is particularly important in countries where English proficiency is not high,” Korena tells us. “But, given the resource capacity, we won't be able to produce everything in all different languages because we don't have all of those language capabilities in our central team.”

Using translation vendors to solve the issue wasn’t always a viable solution, either.

“If we engage external translators, it will still come back to us to do the final check. I've been involved in different projects where I still have to spend time to review the external translator’s work. So I pick up on those things which need to be corrected because they may not be accountants or auditors, and some terms may have a specific reference in the accounting standards or auditing standards.”

Manual translation workflow

They initially solved the issue by using DeepL to translate the text. Then, they had native speaking colleagues review the output.

However, this manual process required the team members to spend days copying and pasting all of the translations into Excel.

“For our resources, we have many templates and toolkits developed in Excel. At the time, we didn’t have a solution to translate Excel documents, which meant we had to manually copy each row and translate and then put it back in.”

According to Korena, this prompted Moore Global to look for something that could translate entire Excel sheets while preserving all formulas and formatting, allowing them to focus on simply reviewing and refining the contents.

That search led them to find Redokun.

The solution

Automatic document translation and formatting

When Moore Global first tried Redokun, they were impressed by the online Web Editor, which extracts text segments from documents and enables seamless translation into the target language. Korena describes the interface as "clean and easy to use.”

However, what they found even more useful was the Pre-translate feature, which allowed them to generate draft translations for the entire document automatically using machine translation engines, including DeepL. Once they had finished reviewing the draft translations and made edits as needed in the Web Editor, they could simply download the translated document.

“I managed to download the Excel output document, which looked really good with everything translated, including all the formulas as well as long as the data tab is translated. I thought that this is something we can actually use to help us with this process and save us time from manually copy-pasting everything back into Excel because that was the way how it was done before.”

Reusing previous translations

Another Redokun feature Moore Global found particularly helpful was the translation memory, a database that automatically saves translations from past projects.

Previously, they would extract translations from Excel, place them into a Word document, run them through DeepL, and review the translations in Word. Of course, this was followed by the tedious task of pasting everything back into Excel, row by row.

Because the review was always happening on different platforms, this process required the translator to repeatedly apply the same changes to instances of repetitive content across documents.

“With Redokun, one great feature is that the platform actually picks up all the segments, so if there is any repetitiveness, it will pick up on that. So when you are making one change to a segment, you can actually apply the same change to the remaining segments. That just saves you time because if you are editing a Word document, you have to keep making the same changes or you have to find and replace.”

Moore Global also liked that Redokun offers a built-in glossary to prevent terms from being inconsistently translated, which automatically reminds translators and reviewers about the correct translation of the term in their language.

“I think those features are very intuitive and it does save you from having to go through and check, apply the new phrases, or revise the translation over and over again,” Korena says.

Collaborative translation

Korena tells us that using Redokun gave Moore Global the opportunity to engage with the network’s firms directly for translations by adding them to the platform as collaborators. Once the pre-translations are completed for them, all they need to do is "come into the platform and review the translation and make edits if there's anything not translated properly in a technical context."

Because Redokun allows multiple collaborators to join the same document at the same time, this enabled multiple firms to actively work together on reviewing a document. Korena explains that this helped distribute the time spent by each firm to get the resources they needed.

“Ultimately, they just want that one resource, and then why not get them to review it together to reduce the time spent by them. In that sense, it actually saves time for the firm and then everyone can work together to get the same outcome.”

Results

Increased ability to provide translated resources

Moore Global’s initial focus was on technical resources and training, and after seeing positive results with Redokun, the solution was implemented in other divisions within their organization.

The time saved by using Redokun for pre-translating and reviewing documents supported the company in expanding its translation efforts considerably.

“We have other divisions who are using Redokun now to translate their resources. Now, this year, we want to leverage the platform further, and work closely with our firms to provide more translated resources in different languages to our firms."

Before, when Moore Global was just relying on DeepL, their language choices were limited. Redokun’s support of multiple machine translation engines enabled the company to expand its language capabilities further.

“Your platform actually had more language choices. Some languages at the time weren't available in DeepL, but it's already available in your platform because you get languages from two sources."

Efficient translation process for Word, Excel, and PPT

Beyond their main file format, Excel, Redokun also helped Moore Global build an efficient internal translation process for other resources produced in Word and PowerPoint.

“We use Redokun to translate Word, Excel, and also Powerpoint slides. I think all of these document translations work smoothly in your platform. […] The amount of time we spent on getting the resources translated, compared to other solutions, will be much quicker and the platform actually makes it a very easy process as well.”

Faster onboarding and improved collaboration on translation projects

Korena explains that by simplifying the translation process, Redokun enabled Moore Global to streamline its workflow. This made it easier for them to engage with their firms to work together to achieve consistent, high-quality translations.

“I think it's because your platform is very user friendly and it's a very simple, neat interface, people with no prior experience could actually figure out everything right away because you can pretty much just look through everything yourself and you understand how it works."

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Translating resources with Redokun is much quicker and easier than other solutions we've tried, especially with the collaborative web editor that allows multiple people to review the same documents and the translation memory feature.