One of the most difficult aspects of translation project management is setting and then managing the expectations of both clients and stakeholders. While most of you already know what it takes to ensure quality translation project delivery, it certainly helps to brush up your Wordbee translator project management skills.

What can you as a translation project manager do to help ensure that all parties are on the same page and that projects adhere closely to deadlines and budgets? The following are delivery fundamentals in Wordbee Translator to keep your translation project timeline straight and cost-effective.

Meeting deadlines with tight turnarounds

You might consider the following tips for quicker delivery:

1. Using time zones to your advantage
Depending on your language combinations and your supplier database, you can use time zones to your advantage. If you’re in the United States and ticking off assignments at the end of your day, you might try to assign the job to a translator based in Europe who can start the following morning while you’re still sleeping. If your job requires proofreading and you’re in Europe, you might try to assign a proofreader in the USA who can pick up the job the following morning. If you’re clever, you can work time zones to shave a whole day from a project.

2. Splitting documents and jobs
Large documents can be delivered faster if they’re split into separate jobs and worked on by separate translators. The collaborative technology in Wordbee helps to achieve such projects without sacrificing too much quality from the final product, but as a rule, splitting documents and jobs is best avoided if you can.

Whether or not you decide to split a document or job ultimately depends on:

• The size of the document
• The quality you need to achieve
• The amount of pressure you have on your deadline

3.  Using advanced collaborative translation results in a faster time-to-market
Get people involved early in your project, work together with simultaneous collaboration, and get things done quicker. Collaborative features like the Client Portal and in-translation commenting and communications can help you deliver projects faster and cut days off the localization life-cycle.

4. Automatic workflows help you speed up your deliverables and reduce chaos
Setting up workflow templates speeds up project configuration and work assignments within Wordbee Translator. For example, let’s say you’ve created a template to be used as the default template for Codyt projects. It consists of three types of work: Translation, Revision, and Proofreading. When a workflow template is assigned to an existing or new project within the system, the workflow will automatically be included and jobs may be assigned manually or automatically to a specified group of suppliers.

This not only makes the assignment process easy and hands-free, it allows you to get assignments done and kickoffs started after business hours, which can easily save a whole day on the project.

Automatic deadline calculation in Wordbee Translator

In Wordbee Translator, the delivery dates for translation orders/projects/jobs are calculated by the system and are influenced by the following information:

1. Word counting information from the the master document
2. Workload capacity and lead time to start working from your translation supplier

For CoDyt (Continuous and Dynamic Translation) translation projects, you also have the ability to chose between the calculation above or take the project deadline as reference. This means we discount a fixed delta time to each workflow step.

How it works

In Wordbee Translator, the orders/projects and jobs are calculated by the system based on their assignment mode:

• Job proposal:  Workflow profiles include this field for each task in the workflow. They represent the average information from all suppliers which can potentially be assigned for the task.
• Manual: Assignment is defined is defined by service details:
  • For external users, these are defined in the price list (company portfolio)
  • For internal users, these are defined in the user profiles (personal portfolio). They present accurate information based on the definitions available in their user/company profiles.

Details you can manage in Wordbee

• The automatic deadline calculation for translation tasks only takes into account new words, whereas revision or other tasks are calculated for the full document.
• Automatic deadline calculation can be delimited by the platform business hours.
• For order requests, automatic deadline calculation can be adjusted in a flexible way if the deadline requested by the client is too short/large.
• Updating the project deadline can also update the existing job deadlines with the same data (this only works if job deadlines have a valid date/time)

Remember

Automatic deadline calculations can always be overrun by manual manipulations. They’re just proposed for an efficient use of the resource. Project and order deadlines are synced. When registering, delay changes in them (current deadline is changed towards the future).

About Wordbee

The Luxembourg-based company Wordbee has developed Wordbee Translator, a Cloud-based collaborative translation and project management platform and Wordbee Beebox, a CMS connectivity solution. Wordbee helps renowned Language Service Providers, public and educational organisations, and global leading companies to implement high-performance translation technology.