Case Study 20 | Legal Translation
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Many organizations get caught in the quagmire of duplicated translations and the slow process of constantly updating collateral. By proactively building term glossaries and a Translation Memory, this firm drastically overhauled its language spending and workflow - and the results speak for themselves.
This high-technology corporation based in the U.S. needed to translate its legal contract templates that were constantly being updated in different languages. The corporation was working with multiple vendors located all over the world, causing increased costs and long turnaround times.
As a result, 90 percent of the contracts were not sent out on time, and the translation process took an average of over eight weeks to complete. The company needed to simplify its workflow to increase efficiency and translation accuracy.
Chapter 1
The company’s multi-faceted process was taking too much time and incurring unnecessary costs. Managing all of its translation vendors created duplications and discrepancies and made for a workflow that was impractical and frustrating.
In order to make sure their projects were completed on time, it was necessary for the company to establish a consolidated workflow that would allow for increased efficiency and lower costs.
Chapter 2
The company decided to centralize its legal translation process with United Language Group (ULG), due to ULG’s years of legal translation expertise in more than 125 languages. With a network of thousands of specialized in-region legal translators, ULG was able to help the company create a consistent legal specific process to ensure its contracts were being translated accurately and on time.
ULG took a proactive approach and built out assets including style guides, glossaries and a translation memory. By creating these assets, there was increased consistency, faster translation turnaround and reduced costs associated with re-purposing previous templates.
ULG imported the previous versions and approximately half a million words for each language, including German, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, and Japanese, to the translation memory.
ULG collaborated across regions with local translators and reviewers to create style guides and glossaries for more than 50 countries. In many situations, the assets had to be broken down even further by jurisdiction (i.e. Northern Germany and Southern Germany).
ULG put lead linguists in direct contact with the contract reviewer in each region to further streamline review cycles and accelerate the adoption of the new process.
Chapter 3
By partnering with ULG and leveraging the agency’s understanding of global legal translation and in-country review, the company was able to reduce its contract translation process from eight weeks to four. Utilizing its Translation Memory, the company reduced its cost per word by more than 60 percent.
The style guides and glossaries ULG created also reduced the review cycles completed by in-house counsel. After working with ULG, the company now meets 94 percent of all contract timeline and completion requirements.
