Professional translation software
Professional translation software
Would you like to use professional translation software?
Good decision! We help you find and use the best translation software for your business. We help with management decisions and business cases and support you with prioritizing your business needs for selecting the right software.
Translation should not be manual and expensive:
Marketing content, manuals, and product descriptions reach a large audience through translation every day. But good translation does not simply happen with a mouse click: Depending on the amount of text and number of languages needed, a lot of manual effort is required. Fortunately, translation cost and time can be reduced drastically – and volumes can be increased at the same time. How? With the use of professional translation software.
Good translation, fast and affordable!
Why does translation sometimes take so long? Often, documents are re-translated many times, even though they have been translated already. The use of translation memory systems prevents this by storing translations and making them available for reuse. This makes translation much faster and cheaper! However, if it has to be really fast, machine translation comes into play. Machine translation produces results automatically and without humans, in real-time. If this level of automation is secured with an appropriate quality process, the translation result will also be of the right quality. Are you curious about how you can achieve good, fast, and affordable translation in your company?
Read on here to learn how professional translation software actually works. Or contact us directly: We are happy to help you introduce professional translation software.
What is professional translation software?
Professional translation software helps you with your translation processes by automating them. The terms “CAT tool” for “computer-aided translation”, or “TM”, for “translation memory”, are widely used in this context. Professional translation software stores translations that you or your translators have already created and reuses them in the next translation. This saves time, and money and improves the quality of your translations.
How does professional translation software work?
As a first step, professional translation software separates formatting information from the content of your document. This allows translators to concentrate fully on the content to be translated while still being able to view the layout via a preview function.
As a second step, the professional translation software searches its database for existing translations and matches these to the new content. Translations that match 100 percent to the new content are pre-translated fully at no cost to the customer. The software thus determines segments that have to be newly translated. That’s why this kind of software is often called translation memory, or TM. A good translation program works with different hit rates and suggests existing translations that correspond to 80 or 90 percent of the new content, these are then adjusted by the translator.
As a third step, the professional translation software saves all newly created translations in the database. And as a final step, the professional translation software merges formatting and content again and generates a document for each target language in the source format. These steps can of course be extended to include review steps, fixed workflows, or quotation and billing processes.
Find the best professional translation software for your company – with us!
We hope we were able to give you an idea of what professional translation software should do for you! What is most important for you? Which departments will benefit most? Where do you see automation potential? What is your dream picture of a professional translation pipeline? We work with you to gather these needs, search the market for professional translation software, and find out which software solution meets most (or all) of these needs. Before you decide on a translation tool, we test it to the core: Does the tool keep its promise? Can it be properly integrated into your IT infrastructure? Can you customize it to your very specific needs? And of course: are you happy with the cost/benefit ratio?
We take care of this for you
We are happy to select the best translation software for you and your processes with our unbiased tool expertise and experience in the language software sector. We work together with you to find out your needs and, based on this, select just the right software for your business processes.
And we will test your system environment until go-live, help with change management and interfaces, and also support your production environment. At the same time, we keep an eye on your stakeholders’ needs and develop an interface strategy to enable as many departments as possible to integrate with your new translation environment.
For a future-proof translation environment in your company!
What kind of translation software do I need?
This very much depends on your business needs. It is important that your individual processes are analyzed and defined first so that your work will really be improved by the use of professional translation software. But there are some must-haves a good translation software should always offer:
- Automation: The software should standardize and automate work steps, for example with project templates, workflow components, or centrally managed databases.
- Project Management: The software should facilitate project management through dashboards for delivery dates, work progress, reporting, and billing.
- Data processing: The software should handle your data well, support all file formats and enable integrations with your other systems.
- Translation support: The software should simplify translation with a clearly structured and easy-to-use translation editor, provide translation memory functions and an integrated terminology database.
- Quality: The software should provide quality assurance (QA) functions such as formal and technical checks, error evaluations, and separate correction/editing modes.
How can your translation processes be optimized? We are happy to take a look at your processes. Just contact us!
How do I optimize my translation process with professional translation software?
Your translation and editing processes benefit from the implementation of professional translation software in many ways:
- Quality: Reusing existing, high-quality translations increases the overall quality of your translations.
- Time: Automated steps reduce time-consuming manual steps. This allows translations to be delivered faster.
- Collaboration: Connecting all relevant systems to a central TMS reinforces the collaborative aspect between departments.
- Control: Integrated reporting gives you more control over costs, quality, resources, and processes.
- Costs: Automation reduces coordination costs. Reusing existing translations also reduces translation costs while increasing your volumes.
How does my company benefit from a professional translation software?
Everyone in your company who is directly responsible for translation and uses professional translation software benefits directly from the advantages listed above. However, also colleagues who are not directly involved in the translation process, but who for example order translations, will benefit from improved translation results and reduced translation time. Plus there is a component in professional translation software that is very useful for non-translating colleagues: Terminology management.
With well-maintained terminology, editors and authors use the right names for products, parts, and solutions in the source language during the content creation process. The use of the terminology management component in professional translation software also allows the use, maintenance, and enhancement of terminology in all target languages. By always using corporate terminology, you create a consistent brand image and increase consistency in your content. If you want to learn more about terminology management, terminology guidelines, and approval workflows, read on.
How does translation quality improve with professional translation software?
First, the overall quality of your translation processes is improved simply by using standardized workflows. Each translation job is run according to recurring, standard patterns. Translations benefit from this because a structured process gives translators more time and better guidelines to do a good job. In addition, professional translation software offers built-in quality checks: Spelling and grammar checks, tag and formatting checks, and terminology checks. These so-called quality assurance (short: QA) checks enable translators and reviewers to work more efficiently.
As a process owner, you can design QA profiles with quality steps on the basis of your style guides and terminology guides, and you can set up sophisticated review workflows – professional translation software cannot be used more efficiently. By the way, if you are already thinking about the future use of machine translation and post-editing, the combined use of company-specific QA profiles and review workflows in your TMS pays off twice: You optimize the quality of your human translations while collecting valuable data and KPIs for machine translation.
If you like to learn more about the use of QA profiles, we are happy to help!
Finally, consistency and synergies improve the quality of your translations. You achieve this by using the built-in translation memory, the database that stores translations from previous jobs. By matching each new job with the translation memory and reusing existing material, professional translation software ensures consistent, high-quality translations every time – provided that your translation memory itself is of excellent quality. If you are still unsure about the quality of your data: we also help with cleaning up and grooming translation memories and terminology databases so that you get the most out of your professional translation software.
Isn't it expensive to introduce professional translation software?
Sure, professional translation software is not free. But it will be a lot more expensive not to have it! It all starts with an investment: the translation software must be purchased, with licenses, and resources must be available for setup, configuration, and testing. Above all, future users must be trained at various maturity levels during the implementation phase. Plus, just because professional translation software is introduced does not mean that all users will happily use it right away. It is advisable to also think about change management from the start! In the end the benefits will be very convincing not only to management!
The investment in professional translation software will pay off! Why?
As soon as you start working with your professional translation software, you will notice that the translation time per job is significantly reduced, as only new texts need to be translated. At the same time, translation volumes increase because there is much more time left for new translations. Project management costs, such as controlling, coordination, and analysis, are significantly reduced. Last but not least, clients and translators save valuable time because they no longer have to search for the right contact person for questions. Translation = time = money.
You can’t quite imagine this yet?
Imagine working without professional translation software: You want to translate a 300-page revised manual. Added to this is one new chapter, which accounts for about 20% of the entire manual. Although only 20% of the new text is included, you receive a quote for a translation of 100% of the manual.
Imagine what you would save if the translation service provider translated only one new chapter (20%) instead of 100% because the remaining 80% is already available in the translation memory. Multiply this calculation by the number of your foreign languages and the number of translation-relevant texts from your departments. Then you have an impressive savings potential.
Do you think this does not apply to your use case? Show us your process and we will show you where we see potential savings that can be exploited with the introduction of professional translation software. Of course, we will also be happy to create a business case with your numbers.
Is a professional translation software worth all this trouble?
We hear this often, and the answer is: YES! Yes, it is always worth working with a professional translation software.
Of course, choosing the best translation software heavily depends on what you need and how big your budget is. But meanwhile, there is a well-scalable system solution for every budget and even the smallest of processes.
Contact us, and together we find the best translation software for you!
Use case “Connecting translation and authoring processes”
The challenge: A German manufacturer of passenger cars and commercial vehicles with an internal language management department and a central translation management portal must meet daily requirements with standard and consistent processes. Everything from the source format to translation workflow is standardized. To ensure that all processes work smoothly, new interfaces are continually tested and introduced.
Solution: We specify relevant interfaces and accompany the corporate divisions to the production state of the translation workflow. We test workflows for correctness and compliance with the requirements using sophisticated test scenarios. We create comprehensive process descriptions to ensure that all workflows are built using standard modules and meet the customer’s business needs.
Use case “Optimize existing translation workflows”
Challenge: A large 3D printer manufacturer used a cloud-based translation management system, which was adapted to fit the company’s needs by the marketing team until the configuration options no longer met the needs of the fast-growing European subsidiary.
Solution: We analyzed the weaknesses of the existing processes, systems, interfaces, and service providers. We demonstrated the optimization potential to all employees, system manufacturers, and service providers. The subsequent reconfigurations and process refinements have enabled the EMEA team to perform automated translation processes that are faster and more efficient.
Use Case “Introducing Cloud Translation Management System (TMS)”
Challenge: An online service provider had very manual, complex translation processes and wanted an in-house solution that could meet its needs to be more automated, fast, and efficient.
Solution: We analyzed the requirements and prioritized them with the customer. We presented two ideal cloud translation management systems to the customer, one of which the customer selected. We migrated all existing translation resources to the new environment sas set up all workflows according to customer requirements. The customer accepted the system, uses it, and reaches its goals of translating more automated, fast, and efficient.
This is how we support you and your company.
Introducing translation systems
- Evaluating and selecting translation management systems
- Optimizing translation memory data
- Introducing and training machine translation engines
Setting up translation processes
- Streamlining translation processes
- Automating project creation and data exchange
- Testing processes and systems according to specification
Improving translation quality
- Establishing standard processes for QA, QE, Review
- Defining quality metrics and KPIs
- Evaluating and selecting quality tools