Strength of In-House Translators Model

I always wanted to write a blog about this topic as we have a real good in-house team set up of 150+ linguists resources for all the Indian languages.The In-house translators model is a very powerful solution, which actually helps teams to provide seamless services and churn out some super quick translations. 

As we know there are two widely accepted models for translators in the industry: In-house & Freelance. I throw my weight behind the In-house model, since having an in-house team to work on your translation project ensures quality, scalability and more possibilities of successful completion. Although many freelance translators also ensure a fantastic job, there are supreme benefits associated with an in-house translation team.

For example, Webdunia has two production centers in India (City: Indore & Chennai) from where our in-house teams operate. The first advantage we have observed with in-house teams is that before including any translator as a part of our team we can have an initial training session organized based on strengths/weaknesses of each translator.

Training sessions are generally organized for:

• Product Style guides/Language specific style guides
• Trados (and other CAT tools)
• Translation Terminologies, term creation, writing style selection for various domains
• Translation of tricky source material (marketing material, highly flowery language etc.)
• LQA commenting/error declaration/Defending LQA results
• Softskills- email writing/responding to linguistic queries
• Quality assessment and control
• Use of customer specific style guides/ tone
• General proficiency, such as headers, footers, pictures, comments, track changes etc.

The Benefits of choosing an in-house team for your Translation project:

Speed: Quick turn around time.
e.g. A client needs a 50,000 words project of multilingual translation, turning round in 6 days. Though it may not be an uphill task, without a cohesive team it will be very challenging to deliver with the right kind of quality and consistency. However, having an in-house team in place saves a lot of time, which can ultimately be used to bolster quality and consistency.  Thus, in-house team means more time given to translators rather than to the agency and its PMs.

Upscaling could be easier to handle when we have in-house team as PMs could check the progress of the project and based on the urgency they could change the team size. Also, the client can at any time push a few more thousand words without making the entire schedule go haywire.

Consistency

While there may be many translators, CAT tools and sharing TMs within the same premises assures that all churn out a similar quality. Since these in-house personnel have undergone a training to follow certain writhing styles, it becomes easy for the reviewers to give a thoroughly consistent product at the end. Inconsistency seriously impacts quality.

Reliability

Having an experienced team in an in-house set up who truly enjoys working means you are sure of hitting the deadline or even beating it, while quality has already been taken care of!

Maintaining standards

Regular meetings of our in-house teams including translators, proofreaders, PMs and other team mates ensure any linguistic issues that arose during a translation project can be thoroughly discussed and sorted. Valid and valuable suggestions from team members can be used to improve the quality bar, which is possible only in an in-house set-up.

Access to resources

Since translation teams are in-house, any last minute changes, requests, additions, word count spikes can be well communicated to the team and absorbed. Thus, having translators in the vicinity of the PM team is always beneficial.

Thus, in my opinion, the In-house translation model ensures a quality outcome, and it’s an efficient and effective way which works best for most clients. Please feel free to write back for any of your queries. Contact Email

TEP-Three Step Process for Quality Translation

All companies working with multilingual content to cater to world markets may not be familiar with the acronym “TEP”. TEP is a keynote of most translation agencies’ usual workflow to maintain quality throughout the projects. It refers to the three most common stages of any translation project as Translation+Editing+Proofreading. These three steps are essential for each translation/localization projects’ high-quality final output.

TEP is considered as the best practice of translation. A proper TEP sequence ensures superior quality since the text does undergo editing and proofreading process. A proofreader of a Target text checks the source text and therefore know whether a sentence is true to the original text. It verifies that it is legible and has no grammatical errors. The quality of the text, however, is guaranteed if well qualified resources are deployed for Translation and Proofreading process separately, who possess a thorough knowledge of the projects’ domain.

                                                 

It is always suggested that a three step service should be purchased while it is often the expensive option and even more expensive when companies choose to hire two different suppliers instead of one for full process.


There are many companies which do not work with a single vendor for the entire TEP process, probably due to unsurety for the deployment of multiple resources in the TEP process of one project . So it is more likely that they choose two separate suppliers, one for Translation and other one for Editing+Proofreading however this is a more expensive option.

TEP seems a bit more difficult in case of freelancer as there is generally one person who takes care for the complete project so most probably same person will do the proofreading. However, in case of translation agencies it is more likely to get TEP done by multiple resources. There are many Translation agencies who follow the full process as Translation>Editing>Proofreading with multiple resources and to ensure this, they can typically deliver two separate files i.e. Translated and Reviewed. This helps clients’ to track changes made by the reviewer after translation.

When hiring a translation service agency, it is required to know that agency fulfills with these three basic steps (TEP), so that the quality is up to the mark and meets your expectations to have a long run business relationship set-up.

Please feel free to write back for any of your queries. Contact Email.