How memoQ TMS helps Ciklopea streamline the translation process

When you work as a translation project manager, you have many things on your plate. You need to ensure all deadlines are met, prevent miscommunications, enable all stakeholders to collaborate efficiently, and stay on top of everything so that the process moves forward at a healthy pace.

Great project managers are accustomed to context-switching and juggling different tasks, but that doesn’t mean they don’t appreciate tools that help them work smarter—quite the contrary! Here’s how memoQ TMS helped Ciklopea’s project managers overcome challenges that were threatening to cause serious bottlenecks.

Using memoQ TMS was complementary to our existing processes

When adopting new tools, you need to consider the amount of change management inside your organization. We were happy that memoQ TMS nicely fit into our existing workflow and that there was not a steep learning curve to it.

The main issue we faced was related to multilingual Excel files that included multiple languages across multiple sheets and columns. Needless to say, it gets messy and difficult to track progress when you’re staring at numerous rows and cells in such a format.

Luckily, memoQ TMS allowed us to set up these multilingual files quickly and efficiently. It also made it easier to export the files once the translations were ready, without much additional work on the final file.

Saving time and money with memoQ templates

Anyone who’s ever worked within an LSP knows that with long-term clients, you are likely to repeatedly work on similar types of projects. This is particularly true if the client invests in continuous localization and has translation fully integrated into their growth plans.

In those cases, as a project manager, you want to find a way to efficiently manage recurring projects—especially if they include the same project team, similar documents, the same language pairs, and TMs.

With memoQ templates, it’s way easier to kickstart projects of this type; you simply set up a template and you never have to start from scratch again. This approach contributes to the optimization of localization costs because you already have your formula for success—the right people who are in sync and know the bar for quality, the standards that are established, and the terminology and glossaries you can rely on. You just need to replicate it and with memoQ, it’s done fairly easily.

Our technical team set up memoQ templates in collaboration with our PMs. This collaboration was extremely valuable because our PM was able to determine precisely what they needed from the template from the very beginning. So, you set it up once and use it as many times as you need.

memoQ is an advanced solution for managing multilingual files

Ciklopea’s team translates into a variety of languages, most often into CEE languages. Often, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of words that need to be translated within a single project. Bearing that in mind, it’s essential that you have an efficient process in place. To achieve this, the bare minimum is to have a tool that allows you to automate certain tasks and a tool that enables you to manage files properly.

memoQ TMS offered advanced solutions for multilingual files, allowing us to quickly set up multilingual files across multiple sheets and files. But that’s not all, the tool has great options for setting up rules for what to import/not import. This was important for us because the files we receive often include instructions from the client, which can be imported in the form of comments. All this helps us keep our source files well organized and ensures that our linguists have easy access to all the information they need while they’re working.

We also love the flexibility that memoQ TMS offers. You can build dynamic templates for projects and enjoy changing settings and rules for automating tasks.

The power combo: Orchestrum and memoQ TMS

You may know that we developed an in-house tool for project management called Orchestrum that helps us boost our productivity by up to 85% thanks to automation. It works incredibly well in conjunction with memoQ.

We handle project settings (especially for recurring projects) within Orchestrum, and the project teams that are set up in memoQ are also entered there. This allows us to enter data from the projects into Orchestrum efficiently.

You could say that we have the best of both worlds, and our project managers truly feel the difference. The process is streamlined and we have more clarity about the current status of the project. Optimal efficiency is ensured through project templates and making maximal use of the TM and TB. Because we work mostly with PDFs, the TAT is dictated by OCR and technical prep. Once the text is in memoQ, we can assign it to a translator and get to work on these projects extremely quickly.

Better quality and faster translation turnaround times with memoQ

Having a toolkit that supports your productivity and commitment to quality is priceless. When using memoQ and Orchestrum together, we have managed to achieve faster translation turnaround times (especially on smaller recurring projects) and to assemble a winning team of linguists, PMs, and QA professionals who are familiar with texts and niche projects.

Our typical workflow looks like this:

Technical prep (OCR) – Translation – Revision – QA in memoQ (or external QA program)

As you can see, memoQ is the key ingredient that facilitates collaborative workflows and lets translators and reviewers work simultaneously within a single environment.

At Ciklopea, we like to keep things as simple as possible. We found that the quality assurance offered by memoQ TMS works particularly well for smaller projects, so in most cases, we will carry out the QA phase in memoQ. The QA module finds machine-detectable errors and then there’s an LQA that assesses the quality of translations and provides feedback. We tend to treat it as a good starting point; the tool directs your attention so that you can evaluate whether or not some translations need to be revised.

All in all, memoQ TMS is a comprehensive translation environment that’s also compatible with a myriad of file types which means that you don’t need to introduce a lot of changes to the way you work. Ciklopea’s project managers wholeheartedly recommend that all LSPs try this solution as it can do wonders for your productivity and efficiency.

Let’s start a new memoQ project together