From home-based startup to leading LSP and trusted business partner

Ciklopea helps technology, manufacturing and life sciences companies communicate their message across international markets. Trados CAT software provides the platform for its growth.

Founded in 2003 as a small but ambitious home-based translation agency in Croatia, Ciklopea has grown rapidly to become one of the top 20 language service providers (LSPs) in Southern Europe.

The platform for growth

The company’s upwards trajectory has been enabled by its active use of translation productivity software. Back in 2007, when CAT (Computer-Assisted Translation) use was still quite rare, Ciklopea started using Trados Studio to boost its translators’ productivity. With the company growing rapidly, they realized in order to continue their impressive growth, they need to be able to manage larger projects more
effectively. So Ciklopea added Trados GroupShare to the mix, enabling the company to efficiently manage multiple translators working on the same job.

The trigger for Ciklopea’s deployment of GroupShare came in 2010, when the company won a large translation project relating to Croatia’s accession to the
EU. The project required Ciklopea to translate a high volume of some 300 legal documents in a tight timeframe of just 2 weeks.

To achieve this, Ciklopea’s project team needed to co-ordinate ten freelance translators and five editors working in parallel. Deploying Trados GroupShare in a server environment gave the team a scalable project management platform to do this effectively – distributing work and sharing resources to deliver accurate, consistent, quality translations on time.

Sharing brings unexpected benefits

“The biggest impact was that the individual translators and editors, each using Studio, were sharing one master translation memory through GroupShare and could see the work of others,” says Zana Čizmin, Ciklopea’s Chief Business Development Officer.

This not only ensured translation consistency, but fostered a strong sense of collaboration in the team.

“Everyone felt they were working towards a common purpose,” Zana explains. “This drove an even greater increase in productivity; and being able to see the work of other team members, they could help one another more easily and feel more confident.”

In fact, the experience was so positive that it led to several longstanding relationships with freelance translators, many of whom still work with
Ciklopea today.

And another win: greater security

Trados GroupShare has also proven critical to Ciklopea winning business with companies that have stringent security requirements. “Some of our technology clients give us highly confidential work,” notes Zana.

“To win their trust we need a robust platform for securely distributing and storing documents – emailing them as attachments isn’t good enough. GroupShare gives us that secure platform.”

Always on time, always on quality

“We’ve seen productivity increases of more than 35% through our use of Trados software, and we want to build on that,” says Martina. “Use of the cloud, for example, is an area where we want to do more, although it’s still quite sensitive for some clients. We also see great potential for machine translation, so that’s another area we’re looking to explore more in future.”

Martina Ljubičić
Production Manager

Whether or not security is a specific concern, winning business is often about how Ciklopea can consistently deliver quality within very tight deadlines, no matter how busy the company is. If, for example, a pharmaceuticals company must submit a document to the medicines agency, then the deadline is hard and delays are unacceptable.

Production manager Martina Ljubičić explains why the Trados software is so critical:

“Besides using GroupShare to manage projects once they are created, we can set the projects up really quickly in the first place, using project templates in Studio. After translation, we then use Studio’s review and quality assurance functions to efficiently apply client feedback and check overall quality. All of this shortens our turnaround times, while also improving quality and consistency.”

The benefit of using project templates up front means that Ciklopea doesn’t have to continually re-specify all of the requirements and rules for similar types of job.

The project manager simply applies the relevant template, which not only saves significant time but ensures similar jobs are reliably treated in the same way.

For quality assurance, Ciklopea is increasingly using Trados Studio’s built-in QAcapability, tailoring the settings to match its review process. To ensure accurate and consistent use of terms they use terminology management tool MultiTerm which translators and reviewers access directly from Studio. Martina explains,

“MultiTerm is a critical tool in the process and our dedicated quality assurance team uses Studio together with MultiTerm to check everything, including accurate application of fuzzy matches and correct use of terminology.”

Partnerships deliver value

“Trados has helped us grow into a multinational business that is cost-effective at scale, and
we’ve built valuable client relationships as a result.”

Zana Čizmin
Chief Business Development Officer

With the control that Trados software gives Ciklopea over the entire translation process, the company can position itself as a complete translation solution provider to its clients. For example, Ciklopea now also advises clients on how best to realize the benefits of CAT and optimize their own in-house translation processes. “Our clients see us as their partner for language solutions”, says Zana. “Trados has helped us grow into a multinational business that is cost-effective at scale, and we’ve built valuable client relationships as a result.”

In 2016, Ciklopea joined Trados’ LSP Partner Program to deepen its Trados expertise and play a more active role in the software’s development. The company wanted to ensure that it could continue to support further growth.