Need to save time and money on translation projects for your company? Translate using these 10 tips. They comprise the best method for saving money on translation while conserving time.

If you’re working within an organization that uses bilingual employees to produce translations, these tips are sure to cut down on the hours spent translating, and therefore, the associated cost. In fact, they’re proven to save enterprises more than 50% of the time it normally takes to produce high-quality translations.

Producing high-quality translations, in an on-demand environment, using internal resources requires more than a spreadsheet and email strategy. Today there are amazing, easy-to-use translation technologies out there that will help you cut costs and save lots of time.

That being said, we’re confident that these tips will help you, too. Go ahead, learn 10 ways to save time and money on translation right now so that you can increase the bottom line for your organization.

Save Time and Money on Translation: 10 Tips

Here are ten proven ways for how to save time and money on translation projects:

1. Use Premium Translation Management Software

If the most successful organizations around the globe didn’t use premium translation management software, their global operations wouldn’t be as streamlined as they are.

Machine translation and Translation Memory are proven technologies that will help you produce quality translations, quickly, and at a low cost. Premium translation management software will put professional translation tools into the hands of your users; making your translation process easier, safer and more efficient.

Several of the tips below will speak to the exact reasons translation management software helps you to save time and money on enterprise translation projects.

2. Edit Your Machine Translations

Today’s enterprise translation management software is driven by powerful artificial intelligence that can dramatically improve the quality of your translations.

The best translation software allows you to edit translations. Editing your translations creates a continuous cycle of machine translation improvements. You’ll have better and easier to use translation editing tools to work with too.

Dynamic spell-checking, Dynamic Machine Learning and Slack-like instant messaging make editing and collaboration easy.

3. Create Translation Memories

Another way you can save time and money on translation is when you use a translation management system is by populating Translation Memories.

As long as you keep using machine translation without Translation Memory technology, you’re going to keep getting the same first-draft quality translations. Some companies will use machine translation and then pay a professional translator to manually edit the same 1st draft translations that machine translation gives them, over and over again. Within a document repeatedly, and across documents over time. This is extremely inefficient.

Typically, these are words, phrases, concepts and segments of text that machine translation can’t fully understand, but that appear repeatedly in various company documents.

When you use Translation Memory, a user only needs to edit a word or phrase once, and never again. It is auto-filled by the software in the future. This saves time for the user, which means cost savings for your company.

The more people who edit translations in your organization, the faster your Translation Memory grows. Keep this in mind when you read tip #9 below.

4. Use Automatic File Formatting

If you want to know how to save time and money on translation, automatic file formatting is also going to be an important factor.

It’s common to upload a file to translation software and receive an output file that doesn’t match the original in formatting. File layout and formatting consistency is of significant importance to many enterprises, so companies typically spend too much time and more effort creating presentable files in various languages.

With the right translation management software (we’ll recommend one below), you can save hours and hours of work that you would normally spend reformatting a file. Font properties, images, spacing and breaks all remain intact.

5. Upload and Edit Files in Batches

Tip #5 for how to save time and money on translation is to upload multiple files at once for translation through translation management software that uses Dynamic Machine Learning.

Dynamic Machine Learning is AI technology that finds and replaces repetitive text in a single document or across a group of files. Batching files and Dynamic Machine Learning not only reduce the time it takes to produce translations. They work together to bring near-instantaneous translation quality improvement across a whole batch of files.

This is particularly helpful when you’re uploading a batch of related files. For example, if you have a Word document, an Excel spreadsheet, and a PowerPoint that are all related to the same multilingual marketing campaign, you’ll save a lot of time by uploading and editing as a batch.

Uploading and editing a batch of files will bring big productivity gains.

6. Replace your Email and Spreadsheet Management Strategy

Want to save time on translation while preserving your financial resources? Keep in mind that producing and managing translations via email and spreadsheets only works if you have just a couple of translation requests a year.

However, if you’re like most companies, you’re seeing an increase in demand for translations, you’re reading this because you know your organization has outgrown an email and spreadsheet strategy. Enterprise translation management software will make managing translations a breeze across your organization. You’ll be able to collaborate on translations in real-time and access translations at any time from any device.

This means you can change a translation in a moment’s notice and download fully formatted MS-Word, PowerPoint, Excel and InDesign files (as well as many more file types) quickly and easily.

Replacing your email and spreadsheet strategy will make your organization more secure while making translation management a breeze.

7. Be Careful with Scanned Documents

Scanned documents can come with a host of problems if you’re trying to translate them using translation software. It’s important to understand this upfront if you’re translating a document that has been scanned into a computer.

You need to follow certain scanned document translation guidelines upfront so you don’t spend hours fiddling with your document during the translation process to get quality translations. These will help you save money and time when you translate a scanned document.

8. Use a Robust Translation API

If your company connects its applications to each other in order to improve processes, you’ll want to use translation software that gives you access to a robust translation API.

Because having raw translations delivered to your other apps certainly isn’t going to save you time. A robust translation API will deliver dynamic high-quality translations in real-time across your applications and organization.

There are plenty of translation API’s out there, but if you opt for a premium one, you’re going to be able to reap the benefits of powerful translation management software. This will save you time and money for all the reasons we listed above.

9. Onboard Colleagues Successfully

To save time and money on translation, you will want to onboard colleagues successfully.

What does this look like? It means all your users will learn how to use all the translation management features so that you’re getting the most out of its productivity-enhancing technologies. The best enterprise translation management software will make onboarding easy. A successful onboarding process will help users quickly understand how the software works and how to get optimum translations in the easiest method possible.

And the more people successfully onboarded, the more each user’s productivity will improve. Need a refresher on the reasoning for this? See tip #3!

10. Prioritize Security

Another top way to save time and money on translation is to prioritize security.

You’ve surely seen headlines about companies suffering significant monetary damages and losing customer trust due to security breaches. One of the easiest ways to enhance your security is by choosing solutions that will protect your company’s data.

Since you’ll be uploading files that potentially contain sensitive business information and customer data, you need to make sure the translation software you use has the best security standards in place.

Start Saving Time & Money on Translation Now

If you (or someone you know) need to save time and money on translation processes, check out Pairaphrase.

Pairaphrase is a web-based translation management system for enterprises that includes all of the capabilities listed in this article, plus more.

Schedule a live demo today to experience for yourself how Pairaphrase saves hundreds of companies 50% of the time it normally takes to produce high-quality translations.