Agreeing on best cooperation practices

Once you have set up the TMS in your company, you need to inform your vendors that you will soon use it for all the translation projects.

However, before you start, you should agree on certain aspects because work with TMS may be different than the standard terms of cooperation: In particular, you should clarify the following issues:

Terms of cooperation

  • Decide what kind of agreements you should sign with your vendors depending on your business needs (compliance) – Cooperation Agreement, Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), Service Level Agreement (SLA), annexes (e.g. complaints procedure, LQA process, rate cards), etc.
  • Discuss the invoicing terms with your vendor – if you should be invoiced in advance or after translation, monthly or after each project, based on purchase order from TMS or PO from your vendor.
  • Agree with your vendor on how to deal with confidential texts (e.g. work outside TMS).
  • Inform your vendor that not all projects may be processed in TMS (e.g. certified translations, patents, etc.) and agree on a suitable process and pricing for them.
  • Agree with your vendor on how to proceed with non-editable graphics (e.g. export texts to open format files, additional price, etc.).
  • Prepare a checklist for your vendors, outlining aspects not covered by the Cooperation Agreement to be used with your projects in TMS.
  • Make sure the Language Service Provider (LSP) informs its linguists of all relevant aspects of cooperation with you and ensures all the PMs are also updated.

Communication

  • Decide upon the main communication channel with your vendor for your translation projects (email, TMS notifications, vendor's client portal, etc.)
  • Agree on communication process during the project e.g. when translators have questions – how project participants (linguists, PMs, client) should proceed to keep the deadline.
  • Remember that your vendors may work in different time zones and countries so when setting deadlines make sure you specify it and take account of holidays different than yours.
  • Discuss with your vendor what to do in case of technical problems with the TMS (if you should be the contact person or they can contact support directly).
  • Establish the way of how you should be informed that the vendor has finished the project and how files should be transferred to you (via TMS, by email, via data transfer system, etc.).

Translation in TMS

  • Send all reference materials to your vendor to help linguists deliver accurate translations. Reference materials may include corporate websites, previous translations (not existing in your TMs), offline glossaries, etc.
  • Inform your vendor about the need to use of Translation memory (TM), Termbase (TB), Concordance and what to do in case of conflicting matches (e.g. use the most recent one).
  • Discuss with your vendor whether linguists can use machine translation for particular projects or not.
  • Ask your vendors to use in-context preview if available for particular files to check the translation in reality (not only in the text editor) and the length of texts.
  • Make sure the vendor understands the need to run automatic QA on a file in TMS to check e.g. non-translated texts or invalid inline tags.
  • Ensure your vendor generates the target file from TMS to check its layout after translation (e.g. if there are no hidden texts or if the file is ready to be sent to the final client). If there are layout issues, agree with the vendor who should fix them (if the vendor, discuss an additional price).
  • Ask your vendor to confirm all segments in the text editor so that the TM could be updated automatically.
  • Inform your vendor about the need to follow messages from TMS concerning its potential unavailability for maintenance, which may affect their work and your deadline.
  • Discuss with your vendor how many licenses they will need for their linguists. Inform them that your TMS may be unavailable at certain times due to the exceeding of the number of concurrent users (if applicable).
Note: It is a good practice to prepare a checklist for your vendors, outlining aspects not covered by the Cooperation Agreement to be used. It may list some or all of the above issues relevant for dealing with your projects in the TMS.