Centralized legal translation - ROI considerations

ROI CONSIDERATIONS
With the increasing focus on global revenue generation for
companies of all sizes, general counsel are finding
themselves involved in cross-border transactions in multiple
languages – often upwards of 30 or more. With translations
piling up and pressure rising, centralizing legal translations is
often an afterthought – something global companies realize
they need to take seriously after they embark on
international growth initiatives with little to no structure to
handle the scale or process.
Centralized Legal Translation
This brief outlines key challenges and the ROI
considerations for building a case to centralize
your legal translation.
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There are seven key challenges to address:
1. Leverage global IT infrastructure
2. Automate Legal Translation Management
3. Eliminate waste and redundancy
4. Bring consistency to terminology and risk
5. Establish linguistic quality and accuracy
6. Provide fast delivery to internal stakeholders
7. Establish a system of transparency, measurement
and continuous improvement

KEY CHALLENGES
In our poll of Fortune 500
legal departments, accuracy
and budget tied for first in
terms of the biggest
translation and localization
challenges facing legal
professionals.
If you’re in-house legal counsel, then
you know managing legal translations
on an ad hoc basis is not going to cut
it. Relying on your satellite offices to
manage this work in-country is
inefficient, costly and creates
challenges around consistency,
redundancy and adherence to
corporate style.
These issues are often further
compounded by limited budgets and
resources to manage the content
review for quality control, summing up
to an increased exposure to risk.
Centralizing or managing legal content
across the organization can provide
considerable advantages.
CENTRALIZED LEGAL TRANSLATIONS: ROI CONSIDERATIONS
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If doing nothing is not an option,
then consider these two directions:
1. Regionalize your controls,
whereby a geographical group
controls the checks and
balances; or
2. Centralize your legal translation
process for optimal risk
management.

CHALLENGE #1: LEVERAGE GLOBAL IT INFRASTRUCTURE
Has your organization already implemented a
Content Management System (CMS)?
You may be wondering how well your CMS will support
legal content management from your global stakeholders.
The better you can leverage existing in-house
infrastructure, the faster you will achieve a return on
investment from the centralization process.
Rarely does the purchase of an additional system make
sense and most CMS’ today come with a globalization
component. The critical component you are looking for is
the ability to enable your stakeholders to move content from
the authoring to the translation process without loss of
formatting or metadata. In addition, it should allow them to
engage with your translation vendor as a role in this step.
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CHALLENGE #2: AUTOMATE LEGAL TRANSLATION MANAGEMENT
Managing legal content through the
translation process requires many
steps, often due to the technical and
precise nature of the translation
needed. Typically, it goes from policy
and legal authoring, to translator,
editor, proofreader, project manager,
QA/file engineer, and back to legal
review.
Each project requires six to eight pairs
of eyes before the content is approved
for use or publication. For example, if
you are localizing an average of 10
legal documents per week, into 13
different languages, then this could
multiply the number of touches or
transactions to 910 per week. The
more you can automate workflow in
this process, the faster you’ll find a
return on investment.
Many corporations have been
tempted to overflow legal into
a shared corporate
localization process, only to
produce inferior or polluted
translated legal content.
It is important to recognize that
centralizing legal translation is unlike
centralizing standard corporate
translation (e.g. product marketing and
general content). The specialized
knowledge of legal linguists differs, as
does the setup and maintenance of
productivity tools, including your
translation memory, style guides, style
sheets, glossaries and review
processes.
Due to the nature of legal translations,
many documents require a non-linear
translation approach, creating
problems with both the content and the
workflow, when approached like
traditional localizations.
Content typically managed through
Centralization
• End User License Agreements
• Product or Service Level
Agreements
• Warranties
• Partner Agreements
• Channel Agreements
• Solution Contracts
• Consulting
• Lease Agreements
• Other Services or Recurring
Agreements
• Non-Competes
• Code of Conduct
• Company Policies
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When selecting a legal translation vendor, look for one with
automated internal workflow and the ability to integrate with
your CMS or internal workflow process. You are looking for
their system capability to automate the file preparation,
selection of the translation team, and routing. If they do not
have this capability, then you may be paying for
unnecessary overhead and the inefficiency. For example,
an agency that selects and prepares the content manually
will require 30-120 minutes for this first step alone and then
a similar amount of time once the file is returned from the
translator.
Streamlining processes and eliminating unnecessary steps,
will not only reduce costs associated with manual work, but
is critical to achieving the benefits that make a case for your
centralized ROI.
Tip: For the most acceptable translations, part of
the process should include the ability for teams to
work with in-region reviewers. Aim to do this in
an unobtrusive manner, while gaining their buy-
in and approval, to ensure the final products are
not heavily edited during final review.
CHALLENGE #2: AUTOMATE LEGAL TRANSLATION MANAGEMENT
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CHALLENGE #3: ELIMINATE WASTE AND REDUNDANCY
With your use of a CMS and centralized translation
process, consider viewing your translation as a digital asset,
stored safely in a central repository. As this repository
builds, your asset becomes more powerful – allowing you to
eliminate redundant translations and recycle previously
translated segments to cut cost.
Work with your translation vendor to establish a legal
translation memory process with associated match rules.
Your translation memory then captures previously
translated text and matches it to incoming requests.
Companies typically cut 30% or more of their translation
expenditures through use and maintenance of a good
translation memory. This is especially useful for recurring
documents such as global contracts, boiler plates, manuals
and policy updates, wherein only a fraction of the text
changes. The more content centralized over time, the more
content that will likely be recycled. Translators can then
focus on new content, while proofreading matched content.
Translation memory is also an important productivity tool to
the centralized process for improving consistency.
It is not uncommon for divisions of the same company to be translating similar documents,
using different approaches, and even different translation vendors.
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CHALLENGE #4: BRING CONSISTENCY TO TERMINOLOGY AND RISK
MANAGEMENT
Global companies regularly struggle with consistent
representation in terms of policy, terminology, style and risk.
By building and maintaining a centralized repository of legal
content, stakeholders are assured of consistent corporate
style and terminology use across all their geographies.
To reduce revisions and corrections, as well as establish
stylistic congruency, any centralized process must include
multilingual style guides and glossaries with key words,
phrases and terms for each language pair. The style guide
should not only include legal style preferences, but a
number of other references including literacy level, tone,
formatting and exceptions by country. Such tools, alongside
a well maintained translation memory (see Challenge #3)
will greatly improve the consistency and accuracy of legal
content for any organization. In most cases, your vendor
should be able to automate reference and use of such
materials, as part of the translation management system.
When considering centralizing your legal content translation, the benefit of consistency and risk
management should be factored into your ROI calculation.
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CHALLENGE #5: ESTABLISHING LINGUIST QUALITY AND ACCURACY
Ensuring quality and accuracy for your
internal stakeholders is pivotal in
managing a positive ROI for
centralized legal translation. Attracting
and retaining specialized legal
translation talent across the globe is
not an easy task. Work with a vendor
who specializes in this domain and
brings with it a segmented and stable
database of translators to select from,
as well as a proven forecasting model
to scale with your peak volume needs.
Look for translators with at least 5
years of professional, legal experience.
Require native fluency in the target
and source languages, as well as
technical experience in the various file
formats and tools known to the trade.
Be sure to include in your criteria,
industry subject matter expertise, if this
is important for your content, and/or
ask your vendor to assist in the
development of a translator on-
boarding program.
Tip: A vendor specializing in
the legal translations process
will have a deep and
segmented database of in-
region certified legal
translators; something that
may help you to assess your
LSP’s suitability, to manage
your volume and legal content
needs.
Lastly, identify any additional
requirements up front where possible.
For example, will your internal
stakeholders need sworn translators
for certain countries?
Perhaps your stakeholders regularly
make use of notarization, attestation or
attorney review services? A specialized
legal vendor should be able to provide
you with full service support.
Also, look for a vendor who has a
mature internal quality management
process of its linguists to manage
accuracy and error rate or ISO-9001
certification.
There may be a cost savings benefit
to your organization in addressing
Challenge #5 as well. It is not
uncommon that attorneys do the
translation work, for lack of an
alternative resource. On average,
attorney translation costs 60% more
than professional legal translation. The
cost difference can be substantial,
especially when utilizing external
counsel where the billing rates are
based on a relatively high hourly rate,
compared to the cost of a professional
legal translation.
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CHALLENGE #6: PROVIDE FAST DELIVERY TO INTERNAL STAKEHOLDERS
This dramatic improvement is achieved through the sum
total of small improvements addressed in Challenges #1-5.
When you centralize ordering, eliminate manual steps,
reduce duplicate content, implement productivity tools for
quality control and ensure professional linguistic resources
are in place, the improvement to delivery time is
remarkable.
With legal content, a delay in the translation time is often
tied to a delay in an important business transaction
somewhere in the organization. Speed of delivery is an
opportunity cost or soft cost, but nevertheless, it is an
important consideration for any centralized legal content
ROI business case.
With proper centralization and translation automation, it is not uncommon for organizations to
reduce a three week process to 2-3 days.
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CHALLENGE #7: ESTABLISH A SYSTEM OF TRANSPARENCY,
MEASUREMENT AND CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT
Communication, logistics, reporting, and auditing are not
easy when you are managing employees and suppliers
across multiple regions and time zones. Invisible costs of
administering global programs are high, such as
productivity loss due to glitches in communication. Most
companies cannot track translation expenses across
multiple business units, because costs are hidden in the
line-item detail of project budgets across many
departments.
Look for a vendor who can, as part of their translation
management system, provide you a dashboard with real-
time reporting of important key performance indicators
including per job/language cost, volume, turn-around time,
job quality error, etc. on a user, department and division
basis. Over time, this visibility and tracking will provide for
greater predictability around costs and help improve overall
performance.
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Centralizing legal translation does not make sense
for every corporation, so how do you know if it
makes sense for yours?
A good rule of thumb is, if your organization spends upward of
$200K per year on legal content only, you will realize savings and
benefit from the consistency and quality that centralization brings.
The ROI of centralization tends to grow along with spending. For
example, companies averaging $2-5M per year on legal content
translation will often see a higher percentage of savings than
companies spending $1M per year. See how VIA helped one
world-leading software company streamline its global
contract process.
ARE YOU A CANDIDATE FOR CENTRALIZED LEGAL TRANSLATION
MANAGEMENT?
About VIA
VIA is a trusted provider of legal translation services to leading
brands around the globe including Cisco, Oracle, Google, Nike,
Walmart, HP, Expedia and more.
Contact Us
To learn more about VIA Legal translation
solutions or how VIA can help your organization
achieve improved translation processes, contact
us at 1-800-737-8481 or visit us online at
www.viadelivers.com.

Centralized legal translation - ROI considerations

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