As a global organization, we have a few questions for you:
- Are you getting the quality you expect from your language service vendors?
- Are you maximizing your cost savings?
- Is your content management process optimized from content creation and vendor management to the final product?
If the answer to any of the above is “I don’t know,” rest assured—you’re not alone.
All too often, language services are left to individual regions or markets to handle. From a sourcing perspective, getting insight to this spend and outcome can seem overwhelming and is often an afterthought.
As a business user, having visibility into quality and timeliness across different requirements and vendors feels impossible and scattered. More and more, companies are realizing too much money and risk are being left on the table and turning to a known outsourcing model in the IT world: managed service providers, or MSPs.
What is an MSP?
In the language industry, an MSP is an outsourced, third-party organization responsible for examining translation and localization processes. They implement changes to optimize translation workflows through technology, driving global compliance and providing stakeholders with full transparency on quality, timeliness, and cost savings.
Whether you choose to partner with a larger service provider or leverage one-off local suppliers, your MSP should work with your vendors and provide you with experienced eyes and ears (technology and data!) to get the most out of your global sourcing.
Questions to ask when choosing an MSP
What technology is being used, and how?
Translation requests can often be fast and furious with varying amounts of content and “I needed it yesterday” turnaround requirements.
It’s critical to have workflows in place that minimize the efforts of business users pushing content to their preferred suppliers through customized workflows and integrations with internal technologies.
A cornerstone of a successful MSP is an agile and robust technology that can:
- Seamlessly integrate into your existing processes
- Leverage quality-focused tools like translation memory (TM)
- Incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning automation to maximize cost and time savings
All of these capabilities should be consistently applied and measured across all of your service providers.
Can they provide me the data?
Former CEO of Hewlett-Packard Carly Fiorina said, “The goal is to turn data into information and information into insight.”
Insight is what gives power to any company to hold suppliers accountable for driving quality improvement, reducing time to market, and ensuring that year-on-year cost savings that were committed in your bidding process actually come to fruition.
The job of a language service MSP is not just to provide this data but to leverage years of industry experience to translate it (pun intended!) into the insights your organization needs to meet all of its goals.
Will they help increase quality?
A language services MSP should act as an extension of your business needs, goals, and values. When it comes to the pharmaceutical, healthcare, and medical device industries, it is not an understatement to say lives around the world depend on the quality of your translations.
An MSP should always lead with a quality-first approach. This includes leveraging and training technology and machine learning solutions, defining and measuring quality key performance indicators, and implementing specialized quality service and reporting (QSR) solutions for continuous improvement.
Will they be a partner or just another vendor?
Let’s face it—language services are rarely the only responsibility of a sourcing professional or business user who ultimately relies on service providers to give them what they need, when they need it, and at the right cost.
An MSP should be your consultative partner who understands the ins and outs of the industry, who you can trust to have aligned goals to your business, and who is not just another vendor for you to manage.
Ready to create a partnership with an MSP? Contact us here.