From vendor management to quality management
The classic model sends source files to language service providers, pays per word with discounts for translation-memory matches and receives finished files. When drafts are generated, the paid human effort moves to post-editing and review, so contracts shift towards hourly or per-task pricing with defined edit levels. Light post-editing makes a draft accurate and understandable; full post-editing makes it read as if a native professional wrote it, and marketing copy almost always needs the second. ISO 18587 sets requirements for full post-editing of machine output and ISO 17100 covers translation services generally, both useful references when rewriting vendor agreements.
Owning and cleaning the language assets
Translation memories, termbases and style guides are company assets, yet many sit scattered across vendors' systems. Bring them home. Export memories in TMX and termbases in TBX, merge them, and clean them before connecting them to generation: remove retired product names and claims, settle segments translated two different ways, and add do-not-translate entries for brands and trademarks. A memory full of old terminology will reproduce it at scale. Write ownership of all language assets into every vendor contract, and keep approved claims per market alongside the termbase, since what a product may claim can differ between regulators that share a language.
Market reviewers and quality at volume
In-country reviewers are often marketers with other jobs, and they become the bottleneck. Protect their time. Give them the style guide, the termbase and a clear remit: fix errors, flag cultural problems, avoid preferential rewrites. Score quality with a shared error typology such as MQM (Multidimensional Quality Metrics), which classifies errors by type, including accuracy, terminology, style and locale conventions, and by severity. Review high-visibility assets in full and sample the long tail. Track scores per language and content type, so you can see where drafts are ready for a light check and where people still need to rewrite.
Text inside images, video and layouts
Generated campaigns put words where translation workflows were not built to reach: headlines set into images, on-screen text in video, subtitles and voice-over. Keep text as editable layers in every master, so each language is set by design rather than painted into pixels, and check every language in the finished layout before approval. Right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew mirror the layout, not only the direction of the text. Settle locale variants early, such as Spanish for Spain or Latin America, Brazilian or European Portuguese, simplified or traditional Chinese, and use the same BCP 47 tags across systems, reviewers and vendors.
Updated 25 September 2026