For enterprises with employees scattered around different countries and continents, language is often a challenge.  Corporate policies may indicate that the official language is the one spoken at headquarters, but the fact is not all employees are always fluent in that language.

So what do people do in that situation?

A couple of alternatives, and neither is particularly good for the enterprise. Either the involvement between stakeholders during meetings and e-mail exchanges decreases, or people “copy/paste” text into web translation sites to try to keep up. That may be a bandaid, but at the end it makes people less effective and leaks corporate content in cyberspace.

On top of that, we noticed that our clients — and in the case of LSPs, our clients’ clients — don’t always have the same translation needs for all the different content they need translated. We know, for example, that practically all of their customer-facing content is translated using a TMS, but there are reams of foreign-language content that shows up in the in-boxes of marketers, researchers, executives — even Board Members — where exact translations aren’t always needed, but an idea of what’s that content means, is. All they’re looking for, at least from the start, is the gist.

The knee-jerk reaction to these emails, .doc files and other kinds of documents is to open up their browser window to Bing Translator or Google Translate, cut-and-paste the content in and then press “Translate” to see the result.

But using sources outside of the TMS doesn’t help our clients (or our clients’ clients) with the continual growth of their translation memories, which as I’ve written before, is an often-time overlooked but valuable corporate asset. What’s worse, our LSP clients have no convenient way to turn that gist translation into a paying order when post-editing is required.

We introduced MT Hive to deliver instantaneous translations using the resources you’ve already pinpointed for your regular translation work. You can upload documents using your Translation Provider’s Portal and you can use Add-ins made expressly for Microsoft Word and Microsoft Outlook. The Add-ins are free, but you do need to have a client login — either from your own Wordbee Translator platform or generated by your LSP specifically for you, in order to kick-start the process.

If the resulting quality of that first-run translation isn’t good enough — if the gist is too confusing or not robust enough — you can mark it for post-editing with just one click. Once the post-editing is completed and approved, the new translated segments are added to the translation memories, improving your sources for all future translations.

We’re actively encouraging our clients to recommend that their users and clients use MT Hive whenever they’re in need of ad-hoc translations. Not only will they get an immediate idea of what the text is all about, they’re getting it using their own translation memory assets and their Machine Translation service of choice. By giving our client’s clients an easy way to turn it from being a quick, gist translation into a post-editing order is one more way that MT Hive is helping LSPs improve their bottom line with Wordbee Translator.