How to mitigate risks in translation projects

Manager-level clients and lawyers tend to mention this word the most – risk.  Experience working with managers teaches you that mitigating risk is one of their criteria in making decisions – everyone wants everything to go well.  This article covers three broad principles clients should follow to mitigate risk in translation projects:

1. Establish a good relationship with an LSP
2. Collaborate in the translation process
3. Budget for quality assurance

While there are many, smaller, specific activities that can be done in different situations to mitigate risk in a translation project, adhering to these three principles should lead to the awareness and ability to mitigate risk in any translation project.  

Establish a good relationship with an LSP

Technically, the need to establish a good relationship with an LSP is only relevant for one timely translation need or on-going needs.  Translation services can be transactional, but when the deliverable is important, you will appreciate having a good relationship you can count on.  

Unfortunately, there are too many misleading people impersonating translation companies and even translators.  Each week, we received multiple fake resumes of “professional” translators who have, in fact, copied someone else’s resume and put their own name and contact information in it.  We are able to detect these fake resumes purely because we receive so many on a daily basis. Otherwise, we would not be able to tell without testing, which can be very expensive.  Testing, nonetheless, is the best way to validate a language service provider (LSP). Thankfully, testing an LSP should be free.

The benefits of establishing a good relationship with an LSP include having a vendor that:

• cares about your long-term interests
• invests efforts in being responsible and available
• is willing to make sacrifices for the good of the relationship

Unsurprisingly, these benefits require an investment in time.  In order to not find yourself at the last minute desperate for translation services to meet your own deadline, put some time into getting free translation services as a test for determining if the LSP is right for meeting your needs.   

Collaborate in the translation process

It does not occur to many of our clients at first that they are able to collaborate with us on translation projects.  The degree of collaboration can vary depending on the client’s willingness to mitigate risk or the size of the project itself.  An immigration lawyer collaborating with an LSP on an immigration document translation project looks very different from a nonprofit collaborating with an LSP on an eLearning course.  Depending on your risk profile, the only requirement for collaboration is a degree of willingness. The LSP will guide you from there.

The three most common ways clients collaborate with us on projects is by:

• providing or creating a glossary
• providing or creating a style guide
• contributing to the editing of our work

Glossaries and style guides are key tools for controlling language.  Just as there is more than one way to say the same thing in English, there is more than one way to say the same thing in another language.  Glossaries go a long way in control preferred terminology. Style guides contribute to less objective attributes of the writing such as tone, number formatting and how to deal with acronyms.  Client Review (what we call it when clients review our work prior to the final delivery) allows for personalization of the language at no additional cost.

As an example, imagine an immigration lawyer needs a birth certificate from Polish translated into English for their client. A simple way to collaborate with an LSP is to liaise with the client regarding how to spell their name using the English alphabet.  Another example is a team of nurse practitioners at nonprofit acting as editors to a medical translation of an eLearning course for nurses. These two examples are extremes of how collaboration with an LSP can raise the quality of a translation, reduce time and cost while mitigating overall risk.  

Budget for quality assurance

Quality Assurance or QA (also called quality checks – QC)  is any measure we take to ensure that an expectation is met.  The three most common examples of quality assurance are:

• checking a translation to ensure there are no errors
• checking the layout to ensure the text appears correctly
• checking a target file to ensure it closely resembles the source file

Quality checks partly define quality.  Without quality checks, you would not know what level of quality you had. To LSPs that have a culture of providing quality, these are essential parts of the process, but they are technically unnecessary if the goal is purely to translate a document.  Nonetheless, since the goal is to mitigate business risk, it is prudent to apply as many reasonable quality assurance steps as possible.

Some good news is that some quality checks are free, either for small projects or for larger projects in which it is provided for free due to a good relationship cultivated with an LSP.  Moreover, quality checks reduce time by preventing defects in service.

Quality checks are one of the highest value activities that an LSP can add to a translation– rivaled only by good customer service.  Invest in quality assurance to save time because performing quality checks saves time post-delivery by preventing defects from taking place.

Summary

Risk can be considered a measure of the robustness of quality put into something.  In the case of a translation, it’s like the likelihood that the translation has defects, the project will be delayed or that the project will run over budget.  By establishing a good relationship with an LSP, you enlist support in your own business interests. Collaborating with an LSP further mitigates risk because it ensures the LSP has every possible advantage in providing a service that is customized to your needs.  Finally, supporting quality assurance efforts completes the activities necessary to validate that risk has been mitigated every extent possible.

If you’d like to learn more about how BURG Translations helps you ensure high-quality translations, contact us today.