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fevereiro 13, 2018 |

Why a Project Manager is Essential to Your Success

It’s no secret that translation and localization projects need to respect tight deadlines to stay within their budgets. Every delay means more hours wasted getting things back on track and adds unnecessary costs to your expenses that a project manager can help avoid.

Communication errors, inaccurate information in the glossaries, lack of context.. What was supposed to be an easy translation or localization job can become a nightmare for both your business and your translators.

That’s why a project manager is essential to your success. You have a professional to coordinate the entire team. The person in charge communicates with translators and guides them to maintain workflows and quality standards. The project manager also keeps you updated on the progress.

A project manager identifies problems, finds creative solutions to solve them and makes sure everybody finishes their tasks on time. It’s the easiest way to manage translation and localization, especially when you’re on a budget.

A Project Manager Ensures Successful Work

In 2016, for every $1 billion invested in the US, around $122 million was wasted as a result of low project performance.

Projects that don’t involve a project manager rarely arrive at the finish line. The translation and localization industry is no exception. You need a skilled project manager to oversee software, website, mobile app or game localization if you want to succeed outside national borders, or you’ll risk having nothing to launch in the end.

A missed deadline can cause a long chain of reactions between programmers, localization engineers, translators, and proofreaders. And a translation error at the beginning of the project can require a lot of extra work to correct mistakes, if not discovered in time.

A project manager has alternative work ready to make sure translators don’t waste time waiting after a missed deadline. They also know how to look for eventual errors using the right proofreaders and testers.

From planning to testing, your project manager knows how to organize tasks and milestones to avoid holdups and fix errors with little expense.

A Project Manager Works with Your Global Audience in Mind

When publishing your content for new markets, you need a cohesive strategy to reach the right audiences. This is the only way to generate new leads and convert them into clients, while keeping your global image intact.

People prefer an authentic voice. But you can’t change your story from Berlin to Shanghai, just because you’ve translated from German to Chinese. This type of content may eventually cause problems.

When translators work individually, it’s hard to keep a unique brand voice among various countries and languages. A lot can be lost through translation, especially when the source and target languages don’t share common cultural elements.

With a project manager in charge, translators, linguists, and local marketing experts get enough context to send the right message. They also receive a style guide to help them stay in line with your brand voice. This way, you’ll maintain a solid global image and a strong local presence at the same time.

A Project Manager Coordinates Multinational Teams

A successful translation project means working with local experts and linguists. People from different time zones and various cultural backgrounds. Add to that programmers, technicians, and localization engineers.

Translation teams are complex and include people from various parts of the world, depending on how many countries you localize for. Working with such a team is a hard job. You need to have excellent communication skills, just to start with. You should organize meetings and conference calls to bring these people together. Then allocate individual tasks, monitor and measure work as the project moves on.

A project manager keeps track of all activities. You get a complete image of the scope of your project right from the start; to know how much to invest and what you get in return. How many words they have to translate, in what languages, and in how much time.

The project manager makes everything measurable, to be able to give you reasonable deadlines and to deliver everything in time. This way, you can see progress and make reasonable predictions about your business.

A Project Manager Understands Damage Control

Localization can go wrong in so many ways. Even now, large brands continue to fail when it comes to overcoming language and cultural barriers. Translation and localization can add serious costs to your budget. But you can’t afford to lose your money because of a small translation error.

Companies can lose millions from localization projects gone bad. If you’re just beginning to expand your business abroad, it can be impossible to recover after bad localization. A skilled project manager is able to avoid such errors, by making sure all your content is translated and localized by the book.

He or she knows to identify risks, measure them and prevent damages, as a result of previous experience in the industry. Project managers work with localization engineers, language specialists, terminologists, and business partners to come up with the best version of your content, custom-made for your target audience.

A Project Manager Saves You Important Resources

Project managers can keep costs under control. They know how to avoid unnecessary expenses, thanks to their experience in the industry.

An accurate glossary, better translation memory tools, CAT tools for faster translations. Technology can reduce turnarounds and costs if correctly used. A project manager knows what software to use to help translators deliver high-quality content in less time.

When you localize for five or six countries, these differences can help you cut costs. You get to deliver quality content, in half the initial time. You can launch your product in a new market and increase global sales.

If you’re on your own, you’ll have difficulties in communicating with your team, assigning tasks and setting deadlines. A project manager will keep things together for you. It may seem like an extra cost when looking at your budget, but having someone capable in charge will pay off in the long run.