Posted by Global companies have now realized the significance of translation and localization. With more businesses trying their luck in a foreign marketplace, translating your content and localizing the brand has become crucial. From website content to design and marketing strategies, you have to adapt your current brand persona for the target customers.
When you target markets where not most people are speaking English, it will limit your growth. Because people like to buy from websites that speak their local language. The increasing need for localized content also leads to higher demand for web based translation management systems for their ability to streamline your translation operations and provide you with other tools to enhance your translation project management. Project managers use the TMS system to effectively get away with the hassle of managing translation tasks, teams, and tools.
Must-Have Project Management Features in a Translation Management System
Bring a project manager, you have to be very mindful of your core managerial needs when it comes to choosing the right web-based translation management system. Here are a few features that you must have in your TMS platform to seamlessly manage your translation processes.
Workflow Automation
The more automated your workflow and operations are, the fewer will be the manual hassle to manage files, tools, and other resources. A project manager must look for good automation in the TMS. It will help you reduce the manual hassle of traditional translation management and enhance the speed of task execution. It may also reduce your translation cost because now you will be hiring less staff, as the machine is doing all the heavy weight lifting. With the automation features, you end up saving a lot of time, effort, and money and bring in more work efficiency to your translation project management.
User Management Features
While working on a global translation project, you have to work with in-house and remote project teams, which can be challenging. Using a TMS with smart user management features can help you effectively manage your internal and external translation teams. For effective user management, your TMS interface should be interactive and simple to use. Choose a TMS that provides high transparency when it comes to monitoring the teams and evaluating their activities across tasks. A TMS may allow you to follow a hierarchy, and you can assign everyone their role and authority.
Integration Tools
Most advanced translation management systems would allow their users to integrate other third-party apps into the platform. It will save your team time that they will spend switching between different apps. Not just that, but you don’t have to upload and download your content repeatedly to and from different apps. It may reduce the likelihood of you making mistakes and errors while constantly moving your content between various software. Every TMS can have its own preferences for integrations, so it is something that you must inquire about from your translation service agency. A premium language services provider may provide your customization options when it comes to integrations from third-party software.
Team Collaboration Tools
It is the responsibility of a project manager to enable effective and seamless communication between all teams. Regardless of their location, your TMS must have established communication channels that will allow your team to collaborate in real-time. The best localization management platform will provide you with a secure digital workplace with seamless collaboration. Professional TMSs also provide live chat options, so that teams can interact with each other in a casual and organized manner.
Machine Translations
If you are currently struggling with managing everyday translation loads and your translators feel exhausted most of the time, you may need to bring some automation to your processes. It is good to have a machine translation tool in your TMS that will help you get away with large volumes of translation workload as you enter new markets. Machine translation tools do have their drawbacks but if you use them effectively, they can actually help you significantly speed up your translation operations and relieve the workload from your translation team. Translations generated by a machine tool may have accuracy and relevancy issues. So, you must fix them through post-editing by expert translators.
Performance Analytics
To get complete control of the translation processes, tools, and team, your TMS must have a performance analytics tool. Using this tool, you can have a bird’s eye view of the overall translation project quickly. The performance analytics will provide your real-time statistics and data for your project progression so far. It’ll help you make more informed decisions about your translation strategy and manage your project in a more systematic manner.
Project managers can detect any blind spots and mistakes in the project in time and make time actions to reverse the damage before it is too late. At any point, you can evaluate the gaps between your project trajectory and the actual goals that you want to accomplish.
Final Verdict!
The list of features in this article will help you with managing your translation project seamlessly and smoothly. However, there are several other things that you really need to look into while choosing your TMS. For instance, the language pairs that it supports, its scalability, its industrial expertise, ease to use, does it provide outsourcing options and has a marketplace of vendors, etc. You must carefully analyze your project management needs to figure out what features will work best for you.