Translation quality is over four times more important than cost to corporates, according to a recent survey of over 550 respondents from dozens of countries across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.
Translation software provider SDL found that for respondents “quality is king”. According to SDL Marketing Director David Morgan, “quality is the number one priority, but also the number one challenge.”
The Corporate Translation Technology Survey 2017 builds upon the findings of SDL’s Translation Technology Insights 2016. The most recent survey focuses exclusively on private and public sector organizations, examining what it takes to maintain translation quality at scale.

　　Top translation challenges
· Maintaining quality and consistency across the business
· Shortened project timelines
· Increased demand internally for translations
· Lack of qualified translators
· Educating stakeholders on the translation process
· Translation budgets not increasing in line with demand
· Increase in the number of language pairs to be translated
· Getting sign off on new technology investment
· Managing third-party translation suppliers (eg. LSPs)

　　Is outsourcing an answer?
Corporates are certainly outsourcing translations: to the tune of 89% of the respondents in this case.
Clearly it’s not straightforward for corporates to reach out externally to plug gaps in resource and skills, while also feeling confident about quality and cost control.
This is easy enough to understand. The external resource is an unknown at first, located elsewhere with different ways of working. For project managers already under considerable pressure, the time and effort to allocate, track and manage work can quickly multiply.

　　Is technology an answer?
Greater — or smarter — use of technology is another common route to maintaining quality in the face of growing demand.
CAT and MT make translators more productive, especially through the use of translation memory to speed up translation of content previously encountered and simplify the re-use of quality work.
How much of the content translated by your organization would you say is brand new vs previously translated? For the survey respondents, on average, it’s almost 50-50.
That’s both good news and bad news in the face of increasing demand: good because there’s a lot for translation memories to help with; and bad because equally, there’s a lot that they can’t.
Only just over a quarter (28%) are using machine translation, with Europe (25%) lagging behind North America (35%) and APAC (31%). And even for them, full adoption is some way off: on average they’re using it to translate less than half (42%) of their brand new content. For public sector organizations, it’s as little as one fifth (22%) of their new content, possibly a reflection of greater concern over exposing content to a public (cloud) MT service.

　　What does this mean for corporates?
Outsourcing and in-house: all about sharing
For outsourcing to be a robust solution to growth in translation demand, corporates have to feel confident about the quality they get back, and it has to be easy enough to achieve (ie, without making project management too onerous). This confidence and efficiency can only arise if there is trust between the parties and they work together well. Trust takes time to build, but it can happen more quickly if the parties are working well together from the start.
LSPs and freelancers may never be quite as close and convenient as the colleague you can talk to by leaning over the desk, but corporates can definitely do more to share knowledge and processes with these partners.
Whether they outsource a lot or a little, corporates need to make the most of their in-house resources to cope with increasing demand. Sharing knowledge and managing workflows matters here as much as it does with external partners.
Communication beyond the translation team is vital to resolve terminology queries, review translation quality, and promote correct use of terminology to the wider organization. The more efficiently this happens, the more you can do with existing resource.

　　Machine translation: weighing accessibility and security
Not making a decision carries a risk. If there isn’t a readily accessible, approved corporate MT solution for employees, by default they will use one of the free public-cloud services. Few employees will realize that such free-to-access services store, use and expose the content submitted to them, so they may well leak confidential data.
For corporates that will only contemplate on-premises or private-cloud solutions, there’s no need to hang back from making a choice. Not too long ago, in-house MT solutions just weren’t affordable for any but the largest corporates with the largest translation requirements. But recent advances in MT technology have made in-house solutions practical for a much wider range of organizations.