Easing the Burden of Manual File Processing
Elionetwork is an all-in-one globalization service provider that serves customers in a variety of industries. Headquartered in Singapore, the company’s services range from translation and subtitling to writing, graphic design, and even video production. Elionetwork also has regional offices throughout Southeast Asia, enabling it to offer its extensive array of services in languages like Burmese, Khmer, Lao, and Thai.
Challenge
Manual processes and a variety of formats
Sometimes, the files customers need translated are in formats that add complexity to the translation process. For instance, a single file may need to be converted to another format before translation, split into smaller files for individual translators, reassembled into a large file, and finally converted back into the original format. Elionetwork was having some difficulties dealing with these situations. Their engineers had to manually process files before and after translation, slowing down delivery and leaving the engineers with little time for other tasks.
On top of the manual processing delays, project managers at elionetwork were struggling to coordinate work on high-volume projects with tight deadlines. They had no way to monitor their translators’ progress (short of interrupting their work with emails), which made it difficult to identify roadblocks that could lead to missed deadlines. Each translator’s working environment was also separate from those of other translators working on the same project, preventing them from benefiting from each other’s work as they progressed.
Solution
A user-friendly, high-performing TMS
Melvin Quek, elionetwork’s global operations director, researched translation management systems that could address the issues the company was facing and prepared a shortlist of three solutions. Over a few months, elionetwork tested the shortlisted solutions and ultimately chose Phrase TMS. Beyond its ability to alleviate the company’s project management and manual processing challenges, Phrase TMS’s user-friendly interface helped it to stand out from other solutions.
Elionetwork’s teams were also impressed by Phrase TMS’s performance. Because the company has offices in developing countries whose internet infrastructure is not fully mature, good performance isn’t a given when it comes to cloud-based computing. Thanks to Phrase TMS’s fast servers and minimal overhead, elionetwork’s users in Phnom Penh have just as great an experience with Phrase TMS as their users in Singapore.
A high volume of translation requests and tight deadlines are common in our industry. With Phrase TMS we have been able to reduce some of the challenges we face and also completely automate our translation workflows, which saves our project managers 50% of their time.
Benefits
Freedom and flexibility for translators and developers alike
Using Phrase TMS, elionetwork has succeeded in automating a large portion of the pre- and post-processing work that previously slowed it down. Instead of saddling engineers with the work of splitting and joining files, project managers can now split them directly in Phrase TMS, giving them more flexibility in how they divide work among multiple translators. When translations are ready for delivery, Phrase TMS combines the translators’ work to produce a single file—and thanks to Phrase TMS’s extensive file format support, engineers aren’t constantly converting files between different formats, either.
The collaborative, centralized nature of Phrase TMS has brought other project management benefits to elionetwork, too. Project managers can monitor progress in real time without emailing translators, saving time and helping them to identify issues before they result in missed deadlines. Translators can also share a single translation memory, building it together and benefiting from each other’s work throughout each project.
Elionetwork’s updated workflow has produced per-project time savings of about 30% for translators and 50% for project managers. Impressively, the company has even reported an overall turnaround time reduction of about 50% since it began using Phrase TMS.