On Recommending a TMS to Management
The following is a professional reflection that was written as a part of my Translation Management Systems class in Fall of 2017.
I have, in the past, waxed poetic about the visual and functional appeal of XTRF as a TMS. Now that I’ve had the chance to see it integrated with Memsource (a little service I’m also awfully fond of), my affection for it only grows. So if you do have the capital to make that investment, I would heartily recommend it, but I do have one caveat.
XTRF is not only beautiful and powerful. It is an investment that will only produce dividends if used correctly. Actions must be taken so that that happens. Simply buying XTRF will not make you become exponentially more successful.
At one point, I had the chance to rub elbows with a small but promising translation company that will remain anonymous. I will only say that their power lay not in the quantity of work they received, but in the quality and creativity of their translations. Their work made it to the big leagues. I suppose that’s why they, despite being a small agency, decided on using XTRF as a TMS. Unfortunately, despite their creative prowess, they were also in the woeful position of being led by people who lacked a technological mindset. Moreover, their leadership failed to see or rectify the vacuum of knowledge within the company.
What resulted was a poorly integrated instance of XTRF with a TEnT that left Project Managers with more work than they would have had using one service or the other. Details were falling through the cracks and the staff began to fear that their personal relationship with their vendors was starting to deteriorate. Every effort to mediate the situation stopped at some point on its way to leadership, who, if they fielded any requests, left the problem to fester as they waited for the input of their outsourced IT provider.
This problem would have been solved by the hiring of one technologically savvy project manager… Maybe an engineer. I believe there’s room for the humanities and computer science to mingle in one mind – let’s just call them a localization professional. If they had onboarded someone who knew XTRF and TEnTs like the back of their hand and hired them as a permanent member of the staff, they would have had far more luck moving into the big leagues.
Yes, they would have had to make some changes to the way they worked, but those intentional and well-planned changes would have been far better than the struggling workflows I was witness to. In other words, it’s not that I don’t think XTRF is a bad fit for a small firm. It’s just that if you’re making that big of an financial investment, you have to be willing to do the work that leads to the dividends as well.
