Many difficulties can arise when you manage translation projects for manufacturing documentation. Even small-scale projects come with challenges: budget limitations, coordinating with technical writers and translators across time zones, and keeping terminology consistent across product manuals, spec sheets, and safety instructions.
Translation project management plays a crucial role in overseeing this entire process — ensuring accuracy, timely delivery, and consistency across every language you publish in.
Here are the 6 best practices, at a glance:
- Define the project scope and requirements
- Choose your translation project managers and outline responsibilities
- Find the best people for your translation team
- Choose translation management software (and decide where AI translation fits in)
- Establish a quality control protocol
- Use Translation Memory and a glossary for consistent terminology
How do you stay on top of your translation efforts while keeping technical content accurate and your international rollout on schedule? The answer lies in a reliable system for translation project management.
In this article, you'll learn all the know-how for building an efficient translation project management strategy — one built around the realities of manufacturing documentation, not generic marketing copy.
Overview
- What is translation project management?
- Why it matters for manufacturing marketing teams
- How to plan and manage a successful translation project: The six best practices
- FAQs
What is translation project management?
Translation project management means overseeing the key tasks involved in translating technical content, including:
- Project planning
- Budget control
- Resource allocation (people and tools)
- Team coordination between technical writers, translators, and reviewers
- Quality control — especially important when a mistranslation in a safety instruction or spec sheet has real consequences
In parallel to what translation project management is, here's also what a translation project manager is: a project manager oversees the entire lifecycle of translation projects, including scheduling, organizing, and monitoring workflows. They ensure projects are completed efficiently while maintaining professional relationships with both linguists and clients.
The goal of translation project management is to ensure translation accuracy, timely delivery, and consistency — no matter how many product lines or target markets you're managing.
Think about it this way. Managing a translation project is like being the conductor of an orchestra.
You make sure that all the musicians (translators, editors, proofreaders, etc.) are playing the right notes at the right time. The end result is a performance (translation) that's harmonious and pleasing to the audience (target markets).
In other words, efficient management is the foundation of a successful translation project no matter its scale or complexity.
Why Translation Project Management Matters for Manufacturing Marketing Teams
Effective translation project management is the best way to ensure your manufacturing business launches successfully in a new European market and beyond — many manufacturing SMEs export globally. Your technical documentation — product catalogs, manuals, safety instructions — needs to be accurate and consistent to build trust with new customers and meet regulatory expectations in each market.
The demanding nature of a project manager's job in the translation industry is crucial, as they oversee the entire translation process, ensuring quality and timeliness.
Translation project management allows you to achieve exactly that. To be more specific, a streamlined translation process improves your translation efforts across the key project factors:
1. Secure consistently high translation accuracy across technical documentation
Manufacturing content is unforgiving of small errors — a mistranslated torque spec or safety warning isn't just embarrassing, it's a liability. That's why any translation effort for technical documentation requires both a strong QA process and consistent terminology handling.
- A well-thought-out project strategy allows you to choose and leverage the best translation tools to produce large volumes of properly translated technical content across every target market.
- Plus, a good project manager knows how to set up a solid QA procedure, paired with a glossary that locks in your product terminology across every language.
It will help you hit the right sweet spots with your international customers and avoid costly mistakes that can lead to reputational damage.
2. Ensure effective coordination across technical writers, translators, and reviewers
The reality of modern workflows is that we rely on remote teams all the time. Manufacturing documentation projects often involve more stakeholders than typical marketing translation — technical writers, subject-matter experts, translators, and compliance reviewers all need to stay in sync. It can make project collaboration more difficult because you need to remotely coordinate the efforts of multiple specialists and track their progress. Sometimes, project managers have to stay on top of 20-25 people within one translation project.
As you can imagine (or maybe have already experienced), it can get really messy if you don't adopt an efficient project management approach.
- By optimizing translation project management, you can instantly improve team coordination. No matter how many professionals work on your translations and where they are, you'll know everyone is doing their bit to deliver the best results.
- By providing a clear project plan and translation workflow, a translation project manager makes sure that team members can communicate more effectively and avoid misunderstandings. It means a smoother translation process from A to Z, even for in-house, hybrid, and remote team efforts.
3. Master budget control across product lines and markets
Translation projects can get really expensive. You should keep in mind the costs of hiring translation vendors, purchasing project and translation software, and much more. Besides, added translation costs can spring up at any stage of the translation project and throw you off track — especially when you're translating documentation across multiple product lines and markets simultaneously. If you're scaling from a handful of documents to a much larger volume, here's our guide on scaling technical manual translation specifically.
Even subtle details, like the format of the files for translation, can make a huge difference money-wise. Some translators even charge three times the value of the word for translating PPTs because of the sheer amount of time it takes to click and go through numerous dialog boxes.
- Having a detailed project plan and knowing how to apply the team effort to the translation process is crucial for budget control. You can better estimate the costs associated with translation and even predict the risks of hidden translation costs.
This is the best way to equip your marketing team with tools and solutions to avoid extra marketing spending. So, effective management is crucial if you're under pressure to keep the project within a tight budget.
Read about how the global company WhizCut cut translation costs by 80% and set up a future-proof workflow with translation project management software here.
4. Allocate project resources the smart way
Managing a translation project means using the right resources to complete the project on time and within the budget. But if you're approaching your translation without a strategy, how will you know what resources you need?
You risk making costly mistakes, such as assigning just one translator to a text that requires at least two people to complete it within the set timeframe. By the end of the project, you'll have one exhausted translator who's more likely to have made mistakes because their workload was too large — a real risk when a single project spans multiple product lines.
- With a reliable strategy at hand, a project manager can allocate the right number of translators and other experts for a project based on the size and complexity of the content. They also know what tools to use to assist every team member in their job.
- Managing the project also helps your marketing team identify any problems early on. It means that you can deal with them quickly and avoid diverting too much time and effort to solve bigger problems later in the game.
5. Avoid late delivery on safety-critical and compliance documentation
Deadlines matter more in manufacturing translation than most categories — a delayed safety manual or compliance document can hold up a product launch entirely.
Translation projects can take longer than expected, especially if the text is technical or requires special knowledge in a specific field. And think about all the added time that goes into coordinating project communication, sourcing translation files, and fixing translated document layouts.
And let's face it: you'll often be under pressure to meet tight deadlines for a translation project even if it's a challenging one. It increases translators' workload and can spike the risk of errors.
- A well-built workflow helps you ensure everybody can deliver their outcomes on time and secure the timely launch of your international campaign. No more missed deadlines.
How to plan and manage a successful translation project: Six best practices
Now you know how good translation project management can contribute to the success of your global marketing efforts. Every aspect is at play when you're shaping the project and building the translation workflow.
Below, we've gathered six best practices to help you maximize the efficiency of your translation projects.
1. Define the project scope and requirements
This is a step you simply can't skip. Setting clear project objectives and carefully reviewing the project requirements will help you build an effective strategy to carry out translations. Defining the project scope and requirements is crucial for success in the translation industry.
Make sure you've established the project scope and essential project performance indicators:
- Brief your translation team on the key aspects of the project, such as the source language, target language(s), content type (product manual, spec sheet, catalog), word count, and level of complexity.
- Identify key deliverables. How many translation files should you generate? What formats will you work with? Clearly identify the expected tangible project results for those team members doing the translation job.
- Preview performance evaluation criteria. Define the KPIs you'll use to evaluate your team's performance.
- Set the project budget and timeline. Once you know the translation project scope and stakeholders' expectations, establish how long it will take and how much it will cost.
Pro-tip: If you struggle with creating a realistic timeline for your translation or localization project, try breaking down the project into smaller tasks. Divide the project into smaller tasks and estimate the time and resources required for each task. It's an effective way to build a precise project timeline the whole translation team can follow.
This initial project stage requires constant communication with the stakeholders. Involve them in the discussion and planning process. Making sure everyone is on the same page is crucial for a smooth translation process, strong team communication, and timely project completion.
Here's how to get buy-in from your stakeholders:
2. Choose the translation project managers and outline project responsibilities
With a project scope and requirements in mind, you can now build a team of professionals to carry out the project successfully.
If you prefer to outsource your translations to a translation agency, bear in mind that you might have limited control over the translation/localization process. When picking a translation agency to work with, discuss the level of involvement you can have in the project in advance. Also, find out how the chosen translation vendor will report to you on the project progress.
If you don't hand off the project to a third party, start out by assigning a dedicated project manager (or several, depending on the scope of your project). This person will carry the biggest number of responsibilities, including:
- Planning and managing the entire project
- Facilitating internal and external project communications
- Developing and implementing workflow
- Managing project documentation, etc.
You can easily handle these steps on your own with translation project management software like Redokun. You can use Redokun to assign roles, communicate with your team, coordinate translation tasks, and store all your documents in one place.
Here are two screenshots of how you can view the progress of your projects on Redokun:
3. Find the best people for your translation team
Depending on the scale of your translation or localization project, you might need to work with a number of translators to deal with several languages.
Apart from a project manager, translation projects usually require translators, editors, proofreaders, and subject matter experts. Your team members are the heart of the whole translation effort, so choose every teammate wisely. For manufacturing documentation specifically, prioritize translators with subject-matter familiarity in your industry — a linguist without technical or industry context is more likely to mistranslate specialized terminology.
Find our guide on the best places to find language professionals here.
You could hire a freelance translator or an expert from a translation agency — the choice is yours. The most important thing is to make sure you're hiring an experienced, well-trained translator that ticks the boxes below:
- They are a native speaker of the source or target language and/or have excellent proficiency in both.
- They are skilled in your field or even a similar field.
- They have all the necessary qualifications and good references.
- They are familiar (or willing to familiarize themselves) with your quality control practices.
Once you've assembled the team, assign tasks to every team member. Responsibilities and requirements should be concrete and have clear KPIs. This way, you'll ensure every professional knows exactly what to do and contribute to the translation project.
4. Choose translation management software to streamline the process
Many marketing teams still rely on manual processes to coordinate translation projects across several different channels because of a hybrid workflow. If this is your case too, implementing the right translation management software will become a real game changer for your global marketing efforts.
For example, if you have ever spent weeks copy-pasting translated text back into PDF files or manually handling Excel sheets, you'll be happy to know there is a simple solution that lets you recreate translated files with just the touch of a button.
A translation management system (TMS) is a type of software you can use to automate, coordinate, and optimize your translation processes from content creation, through translation, to publication.
During the translation project, your team can use a TMS like Redokun to:
- Automate manual tasks that otherwise eat up a lot of time. No more copy-pasting text from page to page or looking for the right translation version among dozens of documents.
- Translate multiple file formats in one tool. Depending on the content you translate (marketing materials, legal documents, manuals, etc.) you may work with different file formats. A quality TMS can handle diverse document types, including InDesign, PowerPoint, Word, and more, maintaining their design elements while you translate the text.
- Retain layouts and style automatically: Make all your translations retain the same format as the original, instead of manually copying and pasting text back into the DTP interface.
If you're evaluating machine translation engines to pair with your TMS, see our guide on the best machine translation software for manufacturing SMEs.
Increasingly, project managers are also weighing AI chatbot translation (ChatGPT, DeepL's AI features) alongside traditional MT engines for the first-draft stage of a project. It can speed up translation of customer-facing technical content and adjust tone on request, but it doesn't preserve document formatting and can lose consistency across long manuals — so it's best scoped into the project plan as a drafting aid, not a replacement for the QA step below. See our guide on when AI translation makes sense in your workflow.
Here's what Pia Andresen, a marketing coordinator says about Redokun's automatic formatting feature:
- Store and organize all your translation files in the cloud. Keep all of your translation files in one secure digital location and customize access settings.
- Collaborate with your in-house and remote team members in one place. A good TMS is also a full-scale collaboration space where you can keep in touch with both internal or external team members. No need to keep your project communication on another software or online platform.
- Use machine translation for greater translation speed and quality. Get access to advanced computer-assisted translation tools to speed up your process while boosting content quality. On Redokun, you can leverage Google Translate and DeepL to get accurate translation suggestions, choose the best suggestion for different segments of text, and even pre-translate whole documents.
The list goes on and on. Some translation management systems also have extra non-essential features to enrich your translation workflow even more. If you're a first-time TMS user and don't know how to choose the best software for your project needs, check out our detailed guide on the best translation management tools available on the market.
Pro-tip: Make sure the TMS of your choice is suitable even for those team members who have never used translation software before. Otherwise, you risk spending too much time onboarding your team and navigating the new tool. With this potential challenge in mind, Redokun has built an intuitive, beginner-friendly TMS you can start using right away, no professional training required.
Here's what Kenni Andersen says about using Redokun:
That's a thing I love - it just works. It's so simple. There are not many steps to go through. Like once you upload a file, it's very straightforward.
5. Establish a quality control protocol
Be prepared to run several rounds of proofreading, editing, and reviewing your translations. Your end product should be content that feels naturally appealing to your target audience in the new locale, and this requires immaculate attention to detail during the QA stage. This process should involve the whole team, including translators and SME professionals.
To ensure a convenient and productive quality control process, choose translation management software that allows your team members in different roles to work on translation files simultaneously. For this exact purpose, Redokun offers real-time collaborative editing of translations. If any doubt, your team members can simply leave comments to flag certain translation segments they need help with.
When conducting quality control, pay special attention to aspects of the translated content as:
- Grammar and spelling.
- Cultural relevance and appropriateness.
- Subject matter accuracy.
- Consistent terminology use.
When your QA team has checked all the boxes above, you can rest assured that you've left no stone unturned in the review process. Now your translated content is ready to face the public.
Sometimes, you might need to update content in the source language, which can start a chain reaction of having to edit multiple translations, too. Even a small change in an original file can then disrupt your project schedule.
With Redokun's revision feature, you can simply upload the latest document version to the online editor. It will automatically identify and highlight the new text segments requiring your translator's attention. This saves your team a ton of time and effort while keeping their existing translation progress intact.
Here's video of how the revision feature works in Redokun and how to quickly implement content changes in multiple languages:
6. Use Translation Memory and a Glossary for consistent translations within and across projects
One of the best ways to enhance your quality control protocol is by using Translation Memories (TM). This tool allows your translators to achieve consistent translations effortlessly.
In short, TM is a digital database that stores every translation you've completed before. You can then reuse past translations in new documents, and automatically apply translation suggestions to identical or similar segments in your ongoing translation project.
Most translation management systems have a built-in Translation Memory tool. On Redokun, you can even use TM to run the pre-translate feature, where you can instantly fill out all the segments in a new document that match past translations with accurate suggestions. Even before your team gets to work on them.
For manufacturing terminology specifically, pairing Translation Memory with a dedicated glossary is what keeps your product names, part numbers, and safety language consistent across every document and market. Here's how to build one.
Not sure whether you need a Translation Memory or a glossary — or both? Here's the difference.
Here's a short video that explains how translation memories work in Redokun:
The major benefit of translation memories is that the more you use it, the more efficient it gets. As you continuously add translated content to your unique TM database, the tool provides more matches for new translation projects.
In other words, the more you leverage TM, the less your translators need to work on. The tool will take care of most text segments without you having to lift a finger.
When you upload a file to Redokun for translation, you can use pre-translation to automatically fill out segments where the source text is identical from your previous projects.
Your translators can also get suggestions while they translate for segments where the source text is either identical or similar.
Pro-tip: Invest in building a style guide and translation glossary for your translation projects. It's the ultimate reference point for your linguists, translators, editors, and other team members they can always turn to when in doubt about translation accuracy.
7. See Redokun in Action
Curious to see how all these feaures look like in Redokun?
For this purpose, we've created an interactive demo that helps you understand how Redokun can help you translate your marketing assets 3x faster:
FAQs
What is translation project management?
Translation project management is the process of managing and controlling the translation process for translating various file formats and documents.
What is a project manager for translation department?
A project manager for the translation department is called translation project manager and he/she oversees the execution of translation projects, ensuring they are delivered timely, and cost-effectively.
What is the translation project process?
A translation project process can vary from one company to the other simply because of organisational differences. Some teams prefer to translate documents in-house, and some with translation agencies. However, we can say that a translation project is a multi-step process of translating, reviewing, and editing content for each target language.
How to become a translation project manager?
Becoming a translation project manager can be done by getting a degree in translation studies, getting a course, and most importantly building practical experience. You can start by working as a translator, project coordinator, or localization engineer, and then move on to becoming a translation project manager.
How should manufacturing companies manage translation projects for technical documentation?
The same core principles apply — clear scope, the right team, quality control, and consistency tools — but manufacturing documentation adds two extra requirements: translators need subject-matter familiarity with your industry, and your QA process needs to catch errors in safety-critical content before it ships, not after. A glossary and translation memory built specifically around your product terminology are essential, not optional, for manufacturing translation at scale.
Summary
Effective translation project management is a must if your manufacturing business is expanding into new markets — in Europe and beyond.
It ensures your technical documentation stays accurate and consistent across every language, while saving your team time and reducing the risk of costly, safety-critical translation errors. By streamlining your translation process and using the right technology, you will ultimately improve customer satisfaction, boost profits, and take your business to the next level.
Try using Redokun to optimize translation management for projects of any scale. Start your 14-day free trial today to see how it works for your manufacturing documentation.
Till next time,
Stefano
