Managing large-scale translation operations for a top automotive manufacturer

It’s a given that one of the world’s biggest car manufacturers will need to communicate with people globally – in a smooth, accurate and timely way. But this means a huge amount of translation and localization work - to speak not just to clients, but to staff and other stakeholders.

Coordinating this massive volume of language services work was a big task. Keeping track of translations on an industrial scale, with tens of thousands of projects every month completed by as many as 80 different Language Services Providers, could easily become tricky and inefficient – costing staff a lot of time.

The materials to be translated varied enormously, from legal, financial and technical documents, marketing and multimedia work, software, elearning courses, HR documents, and even demand for interpreters.

• More than 70 different language combinations to work with
• A huge volume of translation work - tens of thousands of projects each month
• More than 300 work processes to analyze and streamline
• Wide variety of translation work in many different subject areas

Acolad was entrusted to plan and run this ambitious project through an RFP process including 50 different providers. To optimize such a vast volume of translation work, we used our many years of expertise in managing large-scale translation projects to plan a bespoke Language Services Center. The Center would need to be set up to coordinate, oversee and manage the client’s myriad translation partners around the world.

We oversaw the hiring, training and integration of a large team of highly motivated staff with expertise in translation project management. Thanks to our decades of specialized work in different industries, we knew what it takes to provide project managers with the expertise in running translation processes in various technical fields – such as the finance, legal, and technical manufacturing sectors.

To enable this center to run as efficiently as possible, we analyzed more than 300 different work processes. This meant that when transferring this previously disparate work into the Language Service Center it could be done in the most efficient way possible. Altogether, this allowed for clearer, faster communication among the multiple stakeholders in those workflows.

Finally, we put in place systems to make sure the whole operation was run in a dynamic way – to allow for regular adjustments to workflows, and optimization of those processes and tools over time.