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Optimising your internal review process 1: what can go wrong

The most successful corporate translation projects are those in which all participants are satisfied with the final result. And one of the keys to this success is the active participation of a client reviewer, a real expert in the product and the terminology used in his local market to refer to it.

What can go wrong in the internal review process

One of the main potential pitfalls with corporate translation projects is that the ‘coordinator‘ – the person who places the order – is not the same as the ‘reviewer‘ – the person who will check the translated documentation. This is typical of large corporations with offices in more than one language region. The more languages that are coordinated centrally, the more relevant this issue becomes.

Although there are exceptions, the coordinator typically does not speak the target languages of the project. This means that they are incapable of judging the quality of the translation. The coordinator has no choice but to trust the supplier and hope the translation generates no negative feedback; in this case, all is well and the project has been a success. But the nightmare begins when one or more people involved in the process send a (generally fairly aggressive) e-mail telling them that the translation was terrible.

To nip this in the bud, it is essential to establish from the outset who will take final decisions – the client? The internal expert? The LSP? All of these pieces must be fitted together into an optimised, efficient internal review process.

In this series of blog posts, we will look at the various issues involved in establishing such a process.

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