No Longer Lost in Translation - The Benefits of a Centralized Localization Model

Imagine this: a multinational consumer products company, with a sophisticated global management system in place to support international sales. Everything seems to be going smoothly.

But as the company’s localization requirements expand at a rapid-fire pace, the translation work starts piling up. There is little to no structure around the localization process, and translations are being handled on an ad hoc basis.

The problems were quite clear:

• Each department had its own set of translators and processes, yet there was no sharing of resources between them. One team might have a Translation Memory (TM) management system and a glossary, another may not — so there were no cost savings from re-purposing previously translated content.
• Requests were coming in from all over. But there was no way to assign those requests to centralized project managers to efficiently work with outside language vendors. Tracking and reporting? Not an option.
• With no centralized cost models or metrics, the company did not have a clear idea of how much they were spending on translation – and more importantly, what the returns were.

Who is this multinational consumer products company? Amway, three years ago.

What did they do? With the help of Acclaro, they worked through pain points, identified needs, and chose to implement a centralized localization model — aptly called the Amway Localization Center.