Show me the….value

Translation is not a commodity. There, I said it. After 30 years of handwringing the industry can breathe easy. The commodity train left the station long ago. Factor in the impact of artificial intelligence in the form of neural machine translation and the commoditization of the translation industry would be a fait accompli. However, the contrary is true. Highly productive and effective machine translation is having the opposite effect. It is allowing progressive LSCs to differentiate themselves by offering better, faster, and more cost-effective translation.

The truth about being treated as a commoditized service is that if your company is not working to add value to its translation services then, yes, your company’s translation services will be treated as a commodity. How can a translation company continue to add value to its core translation service?

Vendor management

One area in which LSCs can continue adding the most value is by partnering with the best linguistic talent they can find. This means vendor management. Many see vendor management as a boring administrative task. Nothing could be further from the truth. If your company attracts the best talent, it will supply the best product. When you raise the profile of vendor management within your organization and as a differentiator to your customers, your operational efficiency and customer satisfaction will soar.

Post-editing

Effective machine translation is now reality, but human editing is still required to ensure publishable quality translation and to improve draft translations to meet the needs of your customers.  Take your vendor management and use it to build highly productive post-editor teams who are not just great linguists but also subject matter experts. Machine translation engines will not always have the data to translate specialized content well. Get the right people and process in place and demonstrate the value that your company can add by improving raw machine translation, so your customers don’t have to.

Training data management

With all that content you are post-editing, you are building up high-value language assets for your clients, which can then be used to train even better machine translation engines. Managing this data and using it to build those better engines is a value-added service. Clients may not yet understand its significance, but your company can educate them and expose the value.

Integration Services

A traditional area of adding value to translations is in publishing translated content. This does not just mean documents. Thanks to the explosion of digital media there is more content than ever that needs to be integrated and published. This covers the gamut from online help, e-learning, application UIs, websites, video games, to Netflix series. Another aspect of content integration is harvesting content for translation. Content resides in myriad stacks and silos. The translation providers who can connect to these data stacks will be the ones to translate that content. Focus your company’s technical capabilities on both collecting and publishing content and you will take the lead in adding value.

Note that this does not mean having to hire a bunch of software programmers. There are lots of off-the-shelf tools and plugins to existing software that enable better content access. Be sure to leverage these to the benefit of your customers and your company.

Here’s the truth: any service can be seen as a commodity if it fails to continue adding value over the minimal offering. Make sure your company is in the position to add value wherever it can in ways that matter to your customers. Do that and what you do will not only add value but be valuable.