You cannot change what has happened in the past. However, you can learn from it by identifying those behaviors that have both helped and hindered your company in the past. Those are lagging indicators. You can greatly benefit from understanding these behaviors and how they've impacted your company. You can change the future by looking at leading indicators and taking a proactive approach with the way you manage your translation with your global communications. It's never too late!
Taking a proactive approach by identifying and managing those leading indicators that have an impact on their projects can help organizations avoid the pain. However, if an organization has never felt the pain, they are less likely to find value in a proactive approach-especially when translation is not their highest priority. It is a vicious cycle that organizations have a hard time escaping.
When do multilingual communications become important enough for organizations to start investing in internal process assessment and management to gain efficiencies in the translation process?
When Language Solutions Inc.
introduced the Client Mentor Program in 2008, they realized that organizations who are managing their translation projects often do not understand how they impact the costs of their translation projects. Eighty percent of organizations with multilingual communications need guidance and assistance in order to mature on the Global Communications Maturity Model. These organizations view their multilingual communications as just an expense. They do not tie translation to return on investment. They will not understand the impact of an inefficient process until they feel the pains associated with a project that does not go as they expect.While the rest of the localization industry focused on the profit side of their business, Language Solutions Inc., set about to define a process measurement system for the client side and to introduce a standard in the industry. The Gilbane Group wrote a paper on Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative and commented that Language Service Providers (LSPs) were uniquely positioned to meet a number of expectations but wondered whether they consistently communicate their value as strategic enterprise resources as opposed to cost control advocates.
Language Solutions set about this task in 2007 and did just that with their own internal metrics defined for managing translation processes efficiently for their clients and for their industry. But we as the language service provider can only control so much... At some point, processes on the client's side are beyond our direct control. The Language Solutions' focus, therefore, is to help organizations gain control of their own internal processes. The Global Readiness Scorecard was designed for their client's benefit to help them evaluate their processes and define the objectives for them to achieve within a specific timeframe. Action plans are then deployed and success can be measured.
Process efficiency translates into cost savings and has a positive impact on timeframes and the quality of the work. All of this can be achieved if an organization understands how their internal processes that happen before and after translation impact the translation process. These are the processes that you can control....if it's important to you.
Bring on the Pain! When Translation Matters