How to organize in-country reviews efficiently

For our clients, reviewing and approving translated content in various countries is often unavoidable for regulatory reasons alone.

This work often has to be performed by experts – in addition to their other tasks, unfortunately – and is almost always time-consuming and time-critical. We know that from experience.

In this article, we would therefore like to address the most important question from our clients on the subject of in-country reviews:

How can we work together to make translation approval processes as efficient as possible?

The most important recommendation is to develop well thought-out, individualized workflows for in-country reviews. Specific roles, objectives and processes are defined in order to avoid unnecessary workload, ambiguities and errors.

Clear distribution of tasks and clear instructions

… for Gemino

The task of Gemino’s translators and linguists is to deliver a correct translation where the message is identical to that in the source text. To do this, the translators need a clearly defined task description, information on the desired terminology and specific instructions for the translation, e.g. in terms of style, before they start their work.

… for our clients

The reviewers on the client company side are experts in the products and are familiar with the specifics of the respective target market. They therefore know best what the specific terminology and style of communication should be like. They provide professionally relevant and specific input. As a rule, however, they are not linguists. The review is only a secondary responsibility. They may also not understand the language in which the source documents were created.
Therefore, for an efficient review, they also need clear, simple guidelines on what to check and how to make changes or comments.

For this we recommend our Guideline for in-country reviews, which explains, for example, how comments should be made in a PDF document or which changes are not useful and why.

Making the best possible use of valuable feedback

Depending on the agreed workflow, we receive our clients’ change requests and corrections from the in-country reviews via an online tool or as a file. Annotated PDF files are still often used, which show the translations laid out with graphics and enable structured and traceable comments.

We at Gemino then evaluate the feedback. We check the changes, categorize them, and finally transfer them to the final files and the translation memory. After final adjustments to the layout, the translated content can then be published.

In general, it is important to us not only to evaluate the changes qualitatively for our continual improvement, but also to always provide our clients with a (statistical) report in the interest of transparency. For example, we differentiate between useful improvements or corrections and preferential changes. Not every justified change should be seen as a deficiency in the translation. And not every preferential change is desirable in terms of budgets and project durations.

If these guidelines are followed, the translation process should always result in a document that optimally supports the desired communicative objective and is also produced as efficiently as possible.

Conclusion

In the best-case scenario, in-country reviews not only enable the selective approval of individual documents, but also generate feedback across projects, from which general rules can be derived. These can help to further reduce the scope of changes in upcoming in-country reviews.