Translation Strategies

Once you’ve created your project and uploaded source files for localization, it’s time to decide who will translate and proofread your content. This article covers all the possible approaches you can mix and match to meet your personal needs and preferences.

Invite Your Team of Translators

Invite as many translators and proofreaders to your project as needed. You can also give the language coordinator or manager access to trusted project members to manage the translation process for you (invite translators, meet deadlines, and maintain quality).

Send email invitations or share invitation links with access to your localization project in Crowdin. You can invite:

  • In-house translators
  • Freelancers
  • Translation agencies you already work with

Manage the project members in the Members tab. For example, you can invite translators, proofreaders, and language coordinators, granting them access to all or only specific target languages.

Order Professional Translations

Crowdin Vendors Store includes professional translation agencies you can hire to translate and proofread your project files. See the list of all available vendors in Store > Vendors.

Some of the transition agencies are integrated with Crowdin via API. These agencies are marked with the icon next to their names in the store. When you decide to work with them, Crowdin forwards your untranslated data directly to the agency, and once completed, the translations are uploaded back to the project.

Professional translation is a paid service where the approximate cost for your project is calculated or negotiated during the purchase.

Configure Machine Translation Engines

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

Configure these engines to use manual or automated pre-translation via MT. A human translator can also review those translations and do post-editing if needed. Otherwise, you can configure an MT of your choice so the machine translations will be shown in the Editor as suggestions to assist your translators.

Read more about Pre-Translation via Machine Translation.

Engage Your Community

If you have a popular product and an active community eager to help you with translations, feel free to start crowdsourcing. It’s an excellent practice to cooperate with members on a volunteer basis and reward their efforts, providing them with some goods, discounts, or any other way that works for both parties.

When working with community translators, a good workflow looks like the following: community translators translate the project, and once the translations are finished, you can order professional proofreading from a translation agency to ensure high translation quality.

See Also

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