The New Year is well underway, and as you (hopefully) maintain your New Year’s resolutions, why not look at your relationship with your current language service provider (LSP)? Are you happy with your translation vendor, or have you thought about switching it up? A translation vendor becomes complacent sometimes . You’ll notice missed deadlines, poor translation quality, or lack of communication with your account manager. It is hard to make the switch – we understand! It’s like being unhappy with your job; you might not love it, but it’s easier than looking for a new one. Starting over with a new translation vendor may seem aggravating, but if your English content is important to you, it should be equally important to be satisfied with your translated content. Don’t let passiveness be an excuse. It’s not as difficult as you might think, and the end result will be an improvement.

Here are some tips for you when you’re looking for new translation services. It is a great idea to get a relationship with your new LSP started on the right foot.

SOME TOPICS YOU MIGHT WANT TO BRING UP INCLUDE:

WHAT WENT WRONG

It’s never great to dwell on the past, but letting your new vendor know about old issues puts your concerns at the forefront. Then, we can highlight and focus on these particular touch points. Your goals become our goals. We want those concerns to disappear!

TRANSLATION MEMORY

Your translation memory (TM) is yours – you can take it with you wherever you go. You may not want to lose the leverage that you’ve built with your old vendor over time. If that’s the case, we can continue to use and expand upon your TMs.

STYLE GUIDELINES AND GLOSSARIES 

If you have style guidelines in place for communication such as font sizes, margins, etc. and also a glossary of key terms used, supply them. We can continue to use and build upon these to keep consistency in your communication.

QUALITY CONTROL 

Organizations look to make the switch due to poor quality, most of the time. We like to throw in this important disclaimer; apply this to the previous two bullet points! If quality was a key concern with your last vendor, it is beneficial to have us review your glossary and style guidelines. We can evaluate them and see if they need to be redone or updated. Of course, with these updates come updates to the TM to make sure these edits are incorporated into each project from now into the future.

TALK ABOUT THE PROCESS

There is good and bad with each vendor. (We try to avoid the ugly!) Talk about what worked and what didn’t work with your last vendor’s translation process. If one of your key issues was turnaround time, let’s assess how we can be more efficient, on the client side and the vendor side, to alleviate this problem.