In Part 1 of this Blog Series, Vocalink Global’s CEO, Amelia Rodriguez, discussed the never-ending battle between the need for speed and the demand for quality, and promised to share some tips for working with your marketing team to speed up the process of creating a global marketing campaign. In Part 2, my colleague, Ahmed Kamal, discussed speed-to-market for global marketing campaigns. For this Part 3, Ahmed challenged me to help those in the public sector achieve faster turnaround times for their translation needs.
As the dedicated Project Manager for Vocalink’s public sector clients, I work with many state agencies, schools, and local governments to translate a variety of documents. From that experience, I’ve discovered three keys to speeding up the translation process in the public sector:
- Understand the Procurement Process,
- Submit Source Documents, and
- Centralize It!
Understand the Procurement Process
There is one single element above all others that slows down the translation of government documents … and it has absolutely nothing to do with translation! Rather, it’s the procurement process, itself. Most government agencies are bound by laws, regulations, and/or rules that govern how they spend taxpayer dollars (and, as a taxpayer, I appreciate that!).
Government processes for spending money often start with a legally-required competitive bidding process. In this process, vendors compete to get a contract. Once a contract is in place, money must be appropriated (officially designated) by the governing body. The typical next step in the process is issuing a Purchase Order. Sometimes, a “blanket PO” is issued to cover expenditures over a stated period of time. In other cases, individual POs must be issued for each project. Only after all of this has happened can a document finally get translated.
As you can imagine, our hard-working public servants looking to have documents translated for their Limited English Proficient (LEP) constituents can easily become frustrated so many hurdles. There may be a few ways to speed up the procurement process (usually via a “declared emergency”), but generally the best way to speed up the translation process is to understand the procurement process and consider translation needs ahead of time – not when that ‘zoning application form’ is needed in Spanish in two days.
Source Documents
Not all documents are created equal. That “Official Rules” list that’s been taped to the wall for five years, then taken down and scanned through a copy machine, is very, very different from a document created and saved in Microsoft Word. A scanner creates an image – not a document file with electronically readable text.
Modern translation is almost always managed electronically. Even though human beings do the translation, they work inside a translation management system (“TMS”). Just like you can’t scan that document taken down off the wall and then edit in in Word, a TMS can’t read scans.
A document created in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, InDesign, or any one of hundreds of other computer programs designed to create and edit text and images is called a “source document.” Without a source document, the translation process slows to a crawl. Sometimes, if the scanned image is good enough, sophisticated OCR software (optical character recognition) can be used to try to recognize the text and convert it to electronically readable text. This still requires a human being to double-check for errors. If the scanned image is poor, it usually means manually re-typing the document to create a source document. Both of these processes add time (and cost) to the translation process.
I work with clients in both the public and private sectors. It’s my experience that the lack of a clean source document is a larger challenge in the public sector. This may be because each document goes through a series of approvals and only the non-editable version is put out to ensure no one makes unauthorized changes. Or, it may be because staff can change with the political tide and the location of the digital copy gets lost over time. Whatever the reasons, the difficulty in finding the source document leads us to the third key to speeding things up: centralize it!
Centralize It!
Have you ever found yourself searching through your computer looking for an old file? You thought you knew where it was but you just can’t find it anywhere! Now imagine you’ve been mandated to translate that document and are bound to a deadline.
Finding where the source document was saved can be a real challenge and can add time to the translation process. Maintaining a centralized repository of documents and their relative translations streamlines the process. This does not mean a pile of documents in a cabinet drawer. This means a digital repository in a computer, or preferably a cloud storage accessible through an internet connection. If your Language Service Provider (LSP) uses a TMS (like Vocalink Global’s Vu system), the system can act as that repository for you. Then, anytime you need a document updated you can ask your LSP, “do you still have that one document we translated a year ago?” and the answer will be “Yes!”
Federal, state and local governments, administrative agencies, public schools and other public sector entities must communicate effectively with their LEP citizens, residents and visitors. Don’t let the procurement process or a lack of source documents slow you down. Consider your translation needs early and get a contract in place, then centralize your source documents through your translation solutions partner. Following these simple steps will satisfy your need for speed! Want more information? Connect with us today!
