By: Allison McDougall
Last month, we covered the top-level benefits that managed service provider (MSP), or enterprise translation marketplace, business models can bring to global pharmaceutical and healthcare companies. As our world continues to become even more connected, and with today’s direct-to-consumer economy, companies of all sizes are increasingly interacting with patients, customers, suppliers, and partners worldwide. It’s a business imperative that requires increasing volumes of compliant content intended to build credibility and trust, engage potential patients and customers, educate and inform, identify behaviors and trends, resolve questions and issues, and ultimately bring people closer together. As a result, the demand for translation services continues to grow, and companies are looking for ways to optimize—and simplify—their translation processes to reduce costs, improve efficiencies, and increase access to treatments.
Enterprise translation marketplace business models continue to gain momentum, as they are essentially platforms that directly connect businesses and their stakeholders with a global network of professional translation agencies and translators (and other suppliers as required) while future-proofing their strategies for increased content automation. These marketplaces enable companies to consolidate and diversify their supplier bases, streamline their translation workflows and approval cycles, reduce costs, and improve the quality of translated content with little to no required change management.
Cost Savings
Cost savings are a key benefit of enterprise translation marketplaces. One of the most effective ways to reduce costs is by centralizing linguistic assets across lines of business, functions, and multiple translation suppliers. From personal experience, most companies still struggle with the realities of identifying stakeholders across the company and consolidating translation memories (TMs), or databases for previously translated content, in order to ensure that content is not being translated multiple times or inconsistently. However, we typically see 30–40% cost savings as a result of centralizing TMs across business functions, departments, and external suppliers through the marketplace.
Beyond technology and centralization of linguistic assets, utilizing an enterprise translation marketplace saves costs by providing an integrated platform for managing translation projects across lines of business and multiple translation agencies. When deciding on an MSP for your business, ensure that the platform in question will enable you to track translation projects in real time, collaborate with translators and internal stakeholders, receive instant feedback on their translations, and finish projects quicker. By having all projects managed in one place, businesses can streamline their workflows, reduce project management costs, and improve communication with all internal and external stakeholders.
A reduced project management effort ensures that companies can adequately scale global content without the need for additional full-time equivalents (FTEs). For companies already looking for creative ways to grow without adding staff, an enterprise translation marketplace is an effective solution to consider. A recent client saved 50% in FTE costs while scaling their translation by more than 200% with this approach.
Machine Translation
In addition to cost savings from consolidated TMs, companies can also benefit from a centralized strategy and model for AI and machine translation. As companies continue to build upon their aggregated TMs through the marketplace, these become the foundation for future language automation and increased quality output from AI and machine translation. A machine translation strategy is much easier to execute and more effective when managed as a feature in a centralized marketplace rather than by supplier. This is a key way that companies can future-proof their strategies through innovation.
Conclusion
A managed service provider offers companies an opportunity to reduce costs through centralized translation assets, AI, and machine learning; more efficient project management; and the need for less management overhead. As the demand for translation services continues to grow, enterprise translation marketplaces are becoming an essential tool for businesses looking to more effectively compete in the global marketplace. Curious to learn how G3’s platform can help you remove the internal burden on your teams while saving you time and money in your global growth strategy? Get in touch today for a free consultation on how our MSP framework can help simplify your translation processes.