Translation Strategies

Once your organization is set up and your first project is created, it’s time for you to decide who will translate and proofread the content you’ll add to the project. There are different approaches to choose from. You can work with the in-house team of translators, hire a translation agency, and ask your community to contribute. Plus, there’s an option to pre-translate files with a Machine Translation engine or Translation Memory. Human translators can do the post-editing afterward.

Since each of the projects in Crowdin Enterprise has a separate workflow, it’s easy to combine different approaches. Workflow is a set of steps the content should go through to get translated. Each workflow step can be assigned to different people or vendors so they can work independently. You can use different translation approaches depending on the content type or products you plan to localize.

To learn more about Workflows, read the Workflows article.

Use Cases

Use various translation methods in parallel or subsequently to find winning combinations for each particular project:

  • Assign in-house translators to the language pairs they specialize in. Delegate translation into less common target languages to a translation agency.
  • Select a Translation Vendor from the Crowdin Store. Assign them both to translation and proofreading workflow steps.
  • Pre-translate files with the Machine Translation engine to assist your in-house translators.
  • Add the TM Pre-translation step to the project workflow to translate the same text used in different versions and parts of your product.
  • If you have an active community, choose Crowdsourcing as one of the workflow steps. Add Proofreading as the next step to review translations by professional linguists.

Assemble In-house Team of Translators

You can invite translators and proofreaders you already work with to your organization or project. These could be:

  • In-house translators
  • Freelancers
  • Translators from the translation agencies you already work with

If you assemble a team of translators yourself, you will need to invite each person separately and manage their permissions within your organization. You can assign translators to the workflow steps and particular target languages. They will be able to access only the assigned workflow steps and related localization resources.

Learn how to invite people to an organization or project.

Send Request to a Translation Vendor

Professional translation agencies can have separate organizations in Crowdin Enterprise. The collaboration between the organizations is based on client-vendor relations. You can choose a vendor from the Crowdin Store or invite the translation agency you already work with to be a vendor for you. For this, the agency should register a separate organization in Crowdin Enterprise.

The good thing about cooperation with a Vendor organization is that there’s no need to invite each of the agency’s translators and proofreaders to your organization or project. You invite only the vendor organization, which receives a secured copy of the workflow steps it was assigned to as an incoming project. Once the incoming project is accepted, they will be able to assign their workflow and specific translators, which will not influence your project’s workflow in any way. All their translations will be marked as translations done by that vendor, not specific people.

Professional translation is a paid service. Client and vendor organizations should discuss the rates and approximate project costs before starting cooperation.

Learn how to invite an Organisation to be a Vendor.

Pre-translate via Machine Translation or Translation Memory

You can pre-translate project files either via Machine Translation engines or existing Translation Memory. Both are used to assist human translators, speed up localization, and save on translation fees. Human translators can then review those translations to do post-editing.

Crowdin Enterprise integrates with the most popular Machine Translation (MT) engines such as Google Translator, Microsoft Translate, Amazon Translate, DeepL Translator, and Watson (IBM) Translator.

You can also connect an MT engine of your choice, and machine translations will be displayed in the Editor as suggestions to assist your translators.

Read more about the Machine Translation engines.

Translation Memory (TM) stores source strings and their translations into different languages. Translation Memory is created for each Crowdin Enterprise project automatically. You can also upload files with your existing TMs to the project.

TM pre-translation lets you speed up the translation of the same or similar strings and saves translation costs. Pre-translate files with TM to translate the same text used in different versions and parts of your product.

Read more about Translation Memory.

Engage Your Community

Crowdsourcing is a localization practice that engages your product’s community to translate your content. The translations made by the community members can then be reviewed by professional linguists or go directly to production. You can invite your community via social media or other channels you use to communicate with them.

Learn how you can implement Crowdsourcing in your project workflow.

Note: Crowdsourcing can only be set up in projects with workflows.

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