What makes them outstanding? They understand very well the markets you sell to. They're probably native speakers of the language of a target market. They know what you're selling and how to sell and use it.
So you won't need to "train them for the job" that much. Who are they? 🤔
- Your distributors or resellers across all markets
- Your colleagues at your overseas branches or subsidiaries
- Your in-house team who speaks the target language
Why Your Market Partners are Your Best Translators
Here's the thing. If you want professional translators who are also experts in your company's field, you'll either need to:
- (A) Pay a lot of money for their expertise.
- (B) Spend an incredible amount of time finding this expert translator.
That's why a lot of companies tap into their network for assistance with producing or reviewing translations. These could be their in-house employees, distributors, resellers, or other market partners.
While they may not be professional translators by trade, they offer advantages and specializations that external translation services often can't match:
- Deep Market Understanding: They're immersed in the local markets and have extensive experience selling to your target audiences. They're likely familiar with the cultural nuances and consumer behaviors.
- Built-in Industry Expertise: They probably know your company's terminologies very well, helping ensure your translated content maintains technical accuracy.
- Native Speaker Perspective: Your distributors may be native speakers of the market language. At the least, they can help you assess the quality of a translation and whether it's suitable for use.
Leveraging your partners and distributors can be often more cost-effective than depending on professional translation agencies. They have familiarity with your products, industry, and brand can lead to fewer revisions and faster time to market.
3 Crucial Steps to Building Strong Translation Partnerships
Collaboration requires coordination. Your colleagues or partners already have their own tasks to worry about. Pulling them into a slow and manual translation workflow can be the ultimate collaboration-killer because it adds too much to their already full plate.
So if you want to work together successfully with them, you need to make the work incredibly easy to execute. Here are 3 crucial steps for success.
Make collaboration easy, not a chore
In any type of collaboration, you'd want those who are involved to be engaged, focused, and cooperative. This is only possible if your collaboration process is simple and frictionless.
In other words, your partners should feel that it's easy to get involved and do their part for a project. If you assign your colleagues or distributors to help with translating or reviewing content, they shouldn't encounter too many roadblocks, delayed communications, or repetitive tasks.
How to simplify collaboration among dispersed stakeholders?
The first step is to establish a process that is clear and easy for everyone involved. Ideally, your translators, reviewers, and proofreaders can access key project details, communicate with other stakeholders, and execute their tasks from the same platform. This way, no time is wasted on chasing the information they need to get the job done.
In the world of producing marketing translations, this usually involves a translation management system. Not only does it help you organize and track the work across multiple languages and stakeholders, but it also serves as a collaboration platform and single source of truth for your team.
You'll be surprised how a simple workflow change can set a positive tone for translation projects of any scale. A good case study would the story of DEA System, a global provider of gate automation technologies
Barbara Stivan, their marketing manager, told us about how she initially faced resistance from her global team when it came to translation tasks.
However, a few months after her company started using translation management software, Barbara shared that:
Set content standards to avoid back-and-forth
Have you ever received a translation where you had to fix inconsistencies or mistakes on the translated terminologies? The back-and-forth is never fun.
Even if your distributors are generally familiar with the industry and language, it's good practice to share a translation glossary or reference with them upfront. Your company may prefer to translate some terms in a very specific way, and the person assigned to translate the content will appreciate having instant access to this knowledge. This way, you're also more likely to receive the final output with little to no mistakes!
Some project managers might send a detailed brief when assigning anyone to a translation. However, this isn't the best method because you still need to prepare, update, and send the brief to your team for each language. This is not exactly efficient for translators either! They would need to comb through the document and compare the text to the brief so they can translate special terms with care.
How to share your company's translation rules with anyone quickly?
The better way is to have an automatic database, like an online glossary, which highlights unique terms and your company's preferred way of translating when they do appear in a document. Your translators will be immediately aware of this when they start to translate that part. Plus, you don't even need to create a lengthy brief that cover single translation rule in your company's book.
All you need to do is create your glossary once, and add more terms to the database as needed. Online translation collaboration platforms like Redokun run automatic checks in the background, instantly alerting your team of key terms as your team works on a document.
Simplify the translation task for your team
Your distributors or colleagues have other priorities throughout their day. So how can you help them be more engaged, interested, and productive when assisting with translations? It's simple: make the task easier for them!
Why make them translate an entire document from scratch when you have AI tools at your disposal? Most fast-moving global marketing teams translate their content using machine translation engines first, then review and refine the output as needed.
Your distributors and local market partners can take on the same role! It's much easier to serve as content quality control rather than try to become a full fledged translator. They would only need to review or fact-check the AI generated translation.
You can even automatically translate documents based on previous approved translations, ensuring your partners don't redo something that has been translated before. This is possible with Translation Memories, another type of automatic database that runs checks on previously translated content for your team. You can find this in Redokun along with machine translation engines.
Checklist for a happy translation partnership
To know whether your current workflow is conducive to successful collaborative translation with your partners, ask yourself these questions:
- Is it easy for the team to start working on a document? That means no copy-pasting or using tools that aren't meant for translation work. An example is trying to translate a piece of content inside a PDF.
- Is it easy for them to ask for help on a task? This means they have instant access to the information they need for a project, such as past translations or a translation glossary for branded terms.
- Are all your translation assets and resources accessible from a single platform? The team doesn't need to switch between tools or tabs to find something.
Final Thoughts
Your distributors, resellers, and colleagues from overseas branches, are among the best people to assist with your global content operations. They know the industry, market, and language very well, plus they also benefit wen translations are delivered quickly and perfectly!
But in order to have a successful translation partnership with them, these three conditions should be met:
- The collaboration process is easy for everyone involved.
- They should have quick access to a knowledge base of your company's translation standards.
- Use AI to simplify the translation task as much as possible for them.
If you're looking for a way to translate technical documents or other content with your distributors more efficiently, consider using a translation management system. Redokun is free to try for 14 days so feel free to test it out with your team.
