The Challenge
As the requests for projects increased, we learned that each project had reviewers in different departments all over the world and each department used different specialized terminology specific to their departments. Operating a single universal translation memory (TM) database was becoming problematic.
As our linguists worked with more departments, they added terms to the TM. Our TM quickly grew too large to smoothly navigate.
Before this unwieldy system became an issue for the client, we spotted the potential pitfalls and wanted to improve our processes.
The Background
Since 2014, we have worked with a Fortune 500 company client that has been undergoing nearly constant change. The company’s initial focus was on a Workday software rollout and HR processes, and primarily used our services to translate job aids and content in Workday. Every year, we updated their content and systems.
As their HR systems stabilized, we needed to update the content less often. After success within the HR department word started to spread and more projects came in from other departments.
The Solution
After analyzing all of the linguists’ comments, we came up with the solution to split the main TM into individual TMs for the different departments. We surveyed all the projects we’d done for the client over the years and grouped related projects into categories. We then used those categories to create new TMs for each category.
This was a significant improvement. We were able to keep leveraging all the work we’d previously done while creating fully populated TMs for each of the departments we were working with.
The Result
As a result, client reviewers make far fewer changes to the translated content, since they spend less of their reviewing time trying to interpret the glossary. Their review time shortens and our turnaround time speeds up–and our final products have higher quality across the board as well.
