Case Study Interlingua

Interlingua Language Services, headquartered in Vienna, Austria, is a certified translation company that operates on an international scale. The company is specialized in technical translation and has been translating in more than 90 language combinations for over 30 years. Other core areas of Interlingua Vienna include the subjects of industry and trade, medicine and pharmaceuticals, law and insurance, as well as business and finance.

Efficient division of labor and accurate translations are decisive to the success of a language service provider. However, to achieve this, uniform and direct communication with customers and involved employees is vital. Prior to the introduction of Across Language Server, the entire order handling correspondence at Interlingua mainly took place by e-mail, which usually made questions concerning the process or the wording inevitable. The additional coordination overhead was extremely time-consuming and only tied in the customer in the translation project at individual points. Moreover, the decentralized sharing of information made it difficult to use consistent terminology and corporate wording.

Simplified Communication

To avoid potential communication issues from the outset, Interlingua decided to make use of the translation management with the Across Language Server. As Austria's first translation service provider certified according to ÖNORM 15038, the company, in congenial cooperation with Across, offers the optimum solution for the direct integration of the customer in the translation process, enabling the customer to co-determine the project flow even more effectively.

More Process Involvement of Customers

"Thanks to Across, our customers can now influence and control the quality management of the supplied translations", observes Sabine Kern, Director of Interlingua Language Services GmbH, Vienna, Austria. "In recent years, the customer needs with respect to the involvement in the translation process have changed. Now, more and more customers want to be actively involved in controlling the process. One of the main reasons for this is the growing awareness of the significance of uniform international external communication." The customer-oriented approach – one of Interlingua's guiding principles – can be implemented effectively with the support of the translation management system of Across. Every customer can easily append his corporate terminology, images, and other context information to enhance the understanding of the source text to the translation order, thereby making them centrally available to all involved in the project. In this increasingly networked world, it is very important for all involved to be able to simultaneously access all relevant data and communicate freely during the translation process. However, customer requirements do not only form the basis for the text creation at the beginning of a translation project. The customer can also track the progress during the entire processing and be integrated in the review process. Any comments that the customer adds are automatically included when the text is sent to the corrector. This mode of customer-specific review makes sure that the required corporate wording as well as the style and text characteristics are complied with and the translation is thus tuned to the target audience in the best way possible.

Close Collaboration, Higher Quality

All who are involved in the translation project benefit from the definable workflows in Across: From the customer perspective, especially the traceability of all processes and the more direct exercise of influence are noteworthy. Project managers and translators appreciate the lower coordination overhead. The translators are assigned the source texts for translations and can use the comment function to directly coordinate details of their work with the language service provider and reviewers. This results in a joint understanding, which in turn enables an accurate translation as the optimum final result. Additionally, the project manager can always query the processing status of the translation tasks. As a platform for all language resources and translation processes, the Across Language Server delivers data security and maximum consistency of the texts. Both the project manager and the translators as well as the customer have concurrent access to all information. All changes are automatically documented and continually applied in Across. Upon completion of the translation, the text is delegated to the reviewer. The reviewer logs in to the Across Server using the Across Client or works in a browser-based edition via crossWeb. Following the correction, the final text is directly transmitted to the customer.

Results

Ultimately, transparent processes and traceable changes do not only reduce the processing time for a translation project and thus the costs for the customer. "The closer collaboration of all involved, especially the proactive integration of our customers, is a key precondition for meeting our own high quality standards and delivering accurate translations. With Across, efficient project handling and high text quality are not competing values, but the result of an optimized translation management", says Sabine Kern.