I set up the Translation Services team for Sony Europe in the U.K. in the year 2000. At that time, the volume of translation was still small enough for almost everything to be handled internally. As time went by, we acquired more internal customers across Europe and Japan. Within three years, the volume that we handled on a monthly basis had increased by 400%.

The volume and number of languages were becoming unmanageable for a small team (1.5 Project Managers, 5 internal Translators and 3 external translation agencies, which employ numerous freelance translators). We could no longer log all of our projects on a spreadsheet. In addition, the number of human errors in project management was increasing, and we were risking the loss of the good reputation that we had built.

We started looking for a system to help us with project management. Initially, we planned to run the system independently from TRADOS, the software used by the Translators at the time. We soon realized, however, that it made more sense to integrate the translation, project management and terminology software, so we decided to buy SDLWorkflow.

Implementation and training started in April last year, and by July, the old systems were completely replaced, with all Translators (both external and internal) and Project Managers using SDLWorkflow. During the summer, we trained the internal Reviewers (over 200 of them), so that all changes could be made directly online inside SDLWorkflow. There would be no more copying, pasting or “winaligning” for the Translators. This in itself turned out to be a major factor in our sudden increase in productivity.

A year and a half have gone by, and we are delighted with our workflow system. The table below shows the activity carried out during the first 12 months of full use of the system into our nine main languages.

Using SDLWorkflow, we only needed 1.5 Project Managers to handle well over 1.25 million words into Spanish and Italian and more than 1 million into French and German. This would have been a utopia before we introduced the workflow system. We now handle 35 different language combinations, and have over 400 registered internal and external users of the system.

But the increase in productivity has not been the only benefit that we have realized. SDLWorkflow has made it possible for us to create useful business reports at the touch of a button. We can show senior management the benefits that we bring to the company in terms of speedier time-to-market and savings achieved. This is critical for a small translation team in an industry where translation is considered a service and not a core business competency.

For more insights into Sony Europe’s workflow processes, attend López-Lavado’s presentation, Implementing Localization Workflow: A Focus on Pan- European Product and Language Resource Management, during the LISA Forum Europe in Warsaw on November 15.