Loc300: Selecting a Translator

The infrastructure that supports effective vendor management, including documentation, systems, and collaboration.

Assessment Questions:

• Does your company have a specific vendor management function?
• Are the responsibilities of the vendor management function clearly outlined in policies and repeatable procedures?
• Is your vendor management function organized in a way that is complementary and collaborative with account, project, and quality management?
• To remain compliant with certifications like ISO 17100 (and even without certification), a wide variety of documents will be collected while conducting vendor management. Does your organization have an organized, easy-to-navigate system for tracking and protecting documents collected?
• Vendor management requires that the same activities be repeated over and over. To the extent possible, given your maturity, are your processes automated as much as possible?

The talent application and testing processes that vendor managers design and translators follow when applying to work with an organization.

Assessment Questions:

• When preparing to conduct recruitment for a particular client or product type, do your localization vendor managers employ translator personas, or profiles of the ideal training, experience, and capabilities for the type of work? Has your LVM function also identified deal breakers that would automatically disqualify vendors from consideration who present too great an amount of risk to your organization?
• Can candidates who your company invites to submit information to be considered for work contracts get a sense for whether or not they'd like to contract with your company? That is, are candidates who are invited to invest unpaid administrative time applying to contract with your organization aware from the start that the rates they stand to be paid will be fair? Are they made aware that your company does what it can to support their moral rights over their translation work?
• Do your vendor managers have a detailed knowledge of the characteristics of the market from which they are recruiting? Do they have systematic scorecards customized to the characteristics of the market in which they are recruiting that allow them to conduct unbiased evaluations of experience, training, and capabilities as represented in submitted portfolios and marketing materials?
• Does your vendor management function have systematic procedures that ensure the consistent and unbiased evaluation of these capabilities: data security, contingency planning, linguistic and translation capability, technological capability? Does your testing of technological capabilities take into consideration where technology falls short for some languages?
• Are your screening processes set up in a way that efficiently uses each candidate's administrative investments of free time into applying for contractual work with your organization? Do your vendor managers give a clear sense of the overall timeline for screening processes? Do you follow up with candidates in a timely fashion to let them know whether they have passed or failed your verification processes?

The information that should be shared and the introductions that should be made to bring new translators aboard an organization.

Assessment Questions:

• Do your vendors sign NDAs/ICAs prior to receiving confidential information from your company? Are contracts re-issued and signed as necessary according to the terms of agreements? Can contractors negotiate the terms of the agreements they sign with your organization?
• Are vendors presented with clear information on how to invoice for payment for work delivered? Are payment systems established up front, and is the ability to issue payments to a translator without inordinate fees being assigned to them confirmed prior to assigning them work? Are the payment terms as indicated in purchase orders within a fair timeframe of 30 days or less? Is the quality of deliverables in terms of meeting specifications determined prior to paying invoices?
• Is the vendor onboarded to any work systems in a clear and efficient way? Are cloud systems via which a vendor can access but not download linguistic assets such as source content, bitext files, translation memories, and TBs utilized where possible?
• Does your company have a clear Knowledge Base via which new and continuing contractors can access answers to frequently asked questions? Can the vendor access documentation that clearly outlines their place in your production workflows, so they understand how their work fits into your overall work cycles? Are training materials and work instructions that make vendor onboarding to work systems efficient provided, especially if the onboarding time is unpaid?
• Is the vendor introduced to important points of contact within your organization, including the translators, VMs, PMs, editors, language leads, and quality managers they can expect to work with? Is it clear to your vendors to whom they should contact to make escalations?

The work done to set individual translators up for success, measure their performance, and develop their skills once they're onboarded to an organization.

Assessment Questions:

• Within your production processes, is the content for translation readied for that process? That is, are vendors always provided translation briefs that outline the dialect, medium, audience, and purpose of the content? Is source content copy edited prior to translation to eliminate ambiguities? Are translators provided strong guidelines for their work, including style guides, glossaries, and high quality translation memories? Are translators given rates and timelines for the work that are fair?
• Are there open lines of communication within your continuous localization and linguistic workflows, so that linguistic teams that work together to produce content can communicate with one another? When your translators submit queries about projects, can they count on receiving a helpful answer from your team within a reasonable time frame?
• Does your company work with a second-party editor to verify the completeness and accuracy in relation to the specifications of the translations delivered by any translator? Does the person checking the translator's work have at least the same if not better qualifications and length of experience as the translator? Understanding that quality is subjective and quality expectations need to be taught and learned, is ongoing feedback on linguistic quality provided to the translator until they have thoroughly learned your expectations?
• Do you implement a tiered system so that it is clear within your organization where your vendors stand, with probationary, developing, go-to, and VIP equivalent levels? Is the translator's status communicated to them, along with clear benchmarks so they know what they need to do to progress?
• Do you have bonuses built into your system to recognize, reward, and encourage stellar work? Do you have systems for clearly communicating performance issues as well, with systems for off-boarding translators whose performance continues to present problems?

Strategies for cultivating a strong talent pool and maintaining a healthy database from which project managers can draw when assigning translation and localization work.

Assessment Questions:

• In terms of rolodex management, is the information you collect in databases about talent relevant? If an individual has been contacted by one vendor manager in your team is that recorded somewhere so the individual is not contacted with duplicate messages? Are opportunities given to talent to update their profiles with new information on training, experience, and credentials? Is continuing education an overall requirement to remain in your rolodex?
• In terms of the active roster in your rolodex, do you keep up to 80% use? That is, for anyone who goes through the onerous and often unpaid process of applying and onboarding to your organization, can they expect to receive regular paid work? Do you have a clear benchmark on the use levels that trigger recruitment for a language, typically around 90%?
• Do you assign a small core team to specific clients and product lines in order to facilitate the development of a clear brand voice and limit the amount of confidential data spread across translators? Do you avoid work assignments that are based upon language pairs and availability alone?
• Does your vendor management function conduct ongoing data analysis and reporting of KPIs to relevant stakeholders? Does more detailed analysis and monitoring take place among production teams on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, while more high level reports are delivered to administrators on a quarterly basis?
• Do you do ongoing surveys of your vendors' work satisfaction? Do you offer regularly scheduled opportunities to re-negotiate rates, and offer automatic raises, especially where performance is stellar?