Language Asset Management: Essential to Enhancing Quality in a Globalized Environment

In our last article, “Language Assets: Digital Assets are a Necessity in Today’s Globalized World,” we spoke about why language resources are akin to physical assets. In fact, the analogy runs far deeper than just that.

For stability in growing your assets—or even netting massive returns, you need to be able save and manage your assets properly, which takes learning and practice of skills. That applies to money just as well as other less visible assets. Language assets are a perfect example of that dictum. To derive benefits from your language resources, you need to manage them well. Filing your data is just part the process. You need to be able to actually manage and utilize them. Here, it helps to look at language assets as monetary assets. If you do not manage your money properly under a set of effective principles, you will likely be left with empty coffers.

Whether you have an in-house team of translators or outsource to a professional company, you will need to ensure that your language resources are being managed properly, especially in this era of globalization.

But why do language assets need to be managed?

For translation, proper management of language assets is the most direct way to translating with better efficiency, higher quality, and lower costs. It helps translators save time and costs on repetitive actions, like revisions and translations that are repeated throughout a document, or constantly checking reference material.

If a translation team can properly manage their language assets, it can save itself, its clients, and its partners from a considerable amount of trouble and effort. Some examples may be appropriate here. The following are disputes that resulted from mismanagement of language assets:

1. The Translation Bureau of Canada was sued by several cooperating language providers who had spent inordinate amounts of time correcting the poor quality (“polluted,” as stated in the claim) translation memories the Bureau had provided.
2. Tripadvisor’s ill-considered translation of the term “COVID-19” in Chinese brought a backlash from some of its Chinese-language users, and the backlash was repeated as a result of the apology letter. (For more on management issues related to this case, see the article posted by Camille on Medium.)

As made exorbitantly clear from these two examples, being able to create a user experience that really feels local and meets local requirements is a question that cannot be ignored in this globalized world. Communicating effectively and with care for the local stakeholders—and avoiding a translation debacle—means handling each and every word with utmost care.

To put it simply, language asset management is not a luxury, it is a necessity.

How does Linguitronics manage language assets?

Language assets should be treated just like monetary assets. They ought to be managed with discipline. They might even require a professional “asset manager”. That is why Linguitronics established comprehensive language asset management standards following its inception in 1993. More recently, in 2016, it improved on itself by forming a language asset management team that is dedicated to managing all the language assets of the company.

The team has the following goals:

To systematically manage translation memories (TMs), glossaries, and term bases (TBs); to provide the linguistic resources needed at each stage of a project, from beginning to end; to enhance the quality and consistency of a translation and subsequent related translations; and, overall, to make the entire translation process more efficient and economical.

Its duties are:

1. Deliberating on Materials for Inclusion into TMs/TBs: Before a translation begins, the team collects the most relevant information (previous versions, reference material) and uses that to create TMs and TBs for the project. Deliberating on what to include and exclude from TMs/TBs results in a final product that has higher consistency and quality.
2. Maintaining and organizing TMs/TBs: After a translation is completed, the team takes the finished material (the TMs and TBs which have been vetted by an editor) and enters it into the database for future use. If done with proper attention, maintenance and organization can accelerate the deliberation and creation process.
3. Feedback handling: The team works in tandem with the editing teams to confirm customer feedback and enter the corrected information into TMs and TBs to ensure that future translations can meet client requirements, while also reducing time spent on vetting. Ultimately, this means that translations are closer to client expectations the first time around, with a lower chance of extra rounds of revision, thus saving time for everyone in the translation process.
4. CAT tool/technical support: The team provides timely support for translation cases by ensuring that tools and assets are combined in such a way as to maximize their use.
5. Training and guidance for TM/TB/CAT tools: Both for the in-house translation team and outsourced translators, the team provides assistance to ensure that tools and assets are used correctly, which results in higher quality and efficiency.
6. Practical research on MT and TMS: Keeping up with the latest in technologies and trends, the team improves upon its asset management methods to maximize the utilization of assets.

“Accurate and on time” has been the guiding maxim at Linguitronics for translation and localization ever since its founding. And to attain both timeliness and accuracy, good management of language assets is an indispensable skill that must be continuously improved.

Internal assets are only part of the equation. Linguitronics is also able to help clients assess the value of existing materials, such as translations and glossaries, evaluate the use of these resources globally, and convert them into a usable form.

If you have unused potential in your language assets that could be of massive benefit as you expand in the global market, contact us for consultation. We can help make your language assets work for you.

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