One of the things I have seen happen to companies is they get locked into a translation vendor’s toolchain, and then when they outgrow that provider in some way, it is very difficult to transition off of them. This is particularly relevant today because the entire industry is being upended by AI, so vendors that are doing well today may be struggling or defunct in a few years.
My general advice to companies is to have a good separation of concerns between technology and service providers. Language technology companies (such as TMS providers), tend to be good at software development, but they are generally not translation service providers. Conversely translation service providers focus mostly on recruiting and managing linguists and most of them are not very tech savvy.
One of the most important things a good Translation Management System does is to give you a lot of flexibility in deciding how translations are done. So, for example, you might route marketing content for Japanese translation to a boutique agency that specializes in that market, while sending translations for other languages to a more generalist agency. My experience has often been that most agencies have weak spots in terms of languages and subject domains they can cover.
A good TMS will also have machine/AI translation built-in, so you can use that as needed in your different workflows. Low visibility help center content, for example, might be translated with little or no human intervention, while high visibility/high impact content such as your sign up flows is extensively reviewed and edited. This allows you to optimize for cost, quality and speed.
This is also why it is important to choose the right content and translation management systems early on in your company’s growth. For example, there are a number of TMS systems that are optimized for localizing games, but give little thought to other assets like long form content (web, helpcenter), life cycle comms, notifications, etc. So just as you can find yourself boxed in by a translation agency, you can also find yourself boxed in by a CMS or TMS that can’t grow with you.
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One situation that is especially important to avoid is a translation agency that forces you to use their TMS and tech stack. While an all-in-one solution is attractive, this is a particularly odious form of lock-in that is very expensive should you ever need to switch. If they are that confident in the services they provide, they shouldn’t need to rely on customer entrapment.
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Choosing The Right Content Management System (CMS)