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May 1, 2023

Seven Thoughts on Efficient Translator Query Management

Decades of experience have shown that translators are excellent usability testers for any kind of text. In their quest for understanding, they often uncover passages that may be ambiguous or unclear. Yes, this can be a hassle to manage, but look at it this way: if your translator does not even understand a text, how can your reader? In other words, solving translator queries has a positive impact on both the source text and the translation! And what if instead of struggling with piles of queries in MS Excel, e-mails, or ticketing systems, you could manage translator queries efficiently and collaboratively? Would this not also be a valuable addition to your quality management system AND save you time and money? We think so!

If you answer ‘Yes’ to any of the questions below, then this text is for you:

Are translator queries part of your daily business? Have you ever wondered if your readers have the same difficulties as the translators when reading your content?
Do your translator queries contain information that you could turn into valuable knowledge or even add to your terminology process?
Are you fed up with trying to manage queries in complex and fiddly Excel lists, inefficient e-mails, or expensive ticketing systems?
Do you ultimately want to lower process costs, raise the quality of your translations, and improve communication with all your stakeholders?

You already know the drill. Your technical writing department, marketing team, or client has delivered the technical documentation or marketing copy of the latest product or service, and now you need the text to be translated into all your target languages.

The usual suspects for handling translator queries

Whether you work in your company’s in-house translation department or as a project manager for a language service provider, translator queries are difficult to manage once they reach a certain volume. And if you have to manage the translation of technical documentation for a new product or service, there will be a lot of queries and little support, since you are most likely stuck with Excel sheets, e-mails, or ticketing systems. All these tools have their advantages, but none has been developed specifically to manage translator queries. Let’s look at their weaknesses in turn:

Excel: Are you drowning under a pile of Excel spreadsheets from different translation projects and of varying ages? Each of them is complex with numerous tabs, rows, columns… and you are the one dealing with both the queries from the translators and the answers from the authors or experts, just trying to stay afloat as wave after wave of e-mails and version chaos threaten to overwhelm you.

E-mails: Speaking of e-mails: yes, we have seen attempts to handle translator queries via the inbox. More often than not though, it is simply impossible to find queries that have already been answered…

which means that you have to ask the same query again…
and bother your client or writer again…
and even risk getting a different answer from the last time

Ticketing systems: Ticketing systems are great – but just not for managing translation queries. For example, Jira is a work management tool designed for software teams; our developers like it a lot. Our translation project managers not at all. They simply are not integrated into translation systems and are too complex. Besides, these ticketing systems are on the expensive side. In other words, with such software you are paying more to still not get what you need.

What do you need?

If you are struggling with translator queries, you are bound to ask yourself:

Why do I have to deal with this? 😉
Why can’t I manage queries in an efficient, systematic, and collaborative way?
How can I re-use queries as term candidates and forward suggestions to improve the source texts directly to the authors?
How can I leverage further benefits from translator queries, e.g., in terms of quality management?

The following seven thoughts pave the way to efficient, quick, and cost-effective query management:

Thought No. 1: Establish a workflow

Managing translator queries consists of a lot of tasks. Make sure that these tasks –entering, editing, delegating, answering, archiving, and searching for queries – can be delegated via a robust and traceable workflow, which you can configure according to your needs. Don’t forget to incorporate different user roles, such as translators, project managers, clients, and subject matter experts, as you have to delegate tasks and define hierarchies according to the workflow. It would be beneficial if you can log each step of the query workflow so that you can view and document every question, answer, note, and delegation for each query.

Thought No. 2: Collaborate

Make sure that every stakeholder is working on a common collaborative platform, preferably and most easily in their web browser or, on the translator side, directly integrated into the translation environment so that queries can be logged with a single click. All communication should then take place within this application, which increases efficiency considerably, especially in comparison to using Excel spreadsheets or e-mails.

Thought No. 3: Save, search, re-use

It’s kind of a no-brainer that all queries should be saved in a database, so that no information gets lost and, above all, translators can search for existing queries and re-use the answers. As a result, knowledge is never lost, and nobody has to answer the same question twice. Queries that relate to important information in the original document can be relayed to the authors within the company. This enables a gradual improvement of the overall process.

Thought No. 4: Integration into your CAT and project management tools

Make it easy for the expert text usability testers: the translators! They like to work in their common environment and thus prefer to stay in their CAT (Computer Assisted Translation) tool. A plug-in, such as for Trados Studio, would greatly simplify the process for translators, who can then not only log, track, edit, and delegate queries directly in the CAT tools, but can also be informed of responses to queries concerning any of the projects they are currently working on. For translators, it is significantly easier to submit queries on an ad hoc basis than to collect them all in a list at the end. This means the translation process does not come to a standstill, which saves you valuable time!

Furthermore, you can eliminate the need to manage information, users, and projects twice and choose a system that can be connected to project management systems and internal client systems.

Thought No. 5: Ensure confidentiality

It is essential to manage the access rights of every stakeholder, especially for LSPs with multiple clients. You have to ensure that only authorized personnel of the respective client can see and process queries that may contain valuable information.

Thought No. 6: Boost quality management

Professional management of translator queries improves the quality of both the source and target text and is thus an important piece in your quality management puzzle! You’ll find another piece in “Thought No. 7”…

Thought No. 7: Harvest the low-hanging fruit, e.g., terminology

Now that you are managing translator queries, why not leverage even more benefits from them? Our experience and a master’s thesis prove that most queries are terminology issues. It would therefore be wise to import answered queries into your termbase, so make sure that your query management software can connect and export content to an easily accessible, powerful, and scalable terminology management system such as Kalcium Quickterm. Your company’s terminology and marketing teams will be especially grateful!

Now you know the most important things to consider when choosing a query management system. But before you do, let us tell you about the advantages:

Your smart query management benefits at a glance

Quick time to market
The well-organized, shorter feedback loops between translators, project managers, and specialists make it possible to process your translation projects quickly and efficiently.
Reduction in costs
Since missing terminology always costs time and therefore money, your decision will pay off in this respect too, because answered terminology queries can simply be imported into your termbase. This enables you to develop and expand your company‘s terminology alongside the translation project.
Better text quality in every language
Thanks to their flair for languages, translators make excellent usability testers for your texts. Their queries can make the authors aware of anomalies in the source text, enabling them to further improve its quality.

So don‘t waste this enormous potential! Turn queries into knowledge, boost quality and efficiency, and lower your costs!

Why not significantly reduce your workload and the number of e-mails exchanged, and, above all, avoid a costly standstill of your translation process?

If you would like more information on this or any other related topic, please do not hesitate to contact us. It will surely come as no surprise that we also provide the leading software solutions for all the challenges described above. Our Smartquery tool takes care of all your translation query needs!

Contact: [email protected], +43 (0)1253 5352