workflow trends and the translator
Are the days gone where language service providers would look critically at the client’s needs before deciding about an appropriate workflow? It seems that there is a trend for a new market: hosting translation oriented CMS and brokering translation requests. There is a challenge in this trend to keep the translators and checkers/editors in mind with your solution.
Surely, to a LSP there is a difference between clients with casual translation needs and the “1 million words into 10 languages every month” client, but what it comes down to in both cases is the translator who has to do the work and the checker to check it. Repetitive tasks can be streamlined to cut costs - sources and target repositories can be linked to translation interfaces (online or desktop), text bodies can be pretranslated, terminology can be pre-checked and post checked. But when doing all this one needs to keep in mind that there is a human translator sitting right in the middle. That person might struggle with lack of context, matches that are not her style and that she would never have translated this way, and maybe even unfamiliar interfaces to do the translation. Keeping the translator’s needs in mind is a challenge.