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Orange Translations is a provider of language translation services based in Greensboro, North Carolina, with offices in Canada, Germany, Switzerland, France, the Philippines and Hong Kong, plus translators and interpreters in over 100 countries.
This testimonial was provided by the company’s Managing Partner, Martin Heimann in November 2012
Before May of this year I had not even heard of Memsource. I became aware of it at the 2012 Association of Language Companies conference in New Orleans. We had long considered implementing a centralized CAT solution, but the size of the investment – both in terms of money and IT infrastructure prevented us from moving forward quickly.
Orange Translations was founded in 2006 and has since grown to a size of 12 account managers and project managers spread across 7 offices. In the past, we would ask translators to work in their own CAT tools and return compatible formats back to us, such as TMX files, which we saved and updated over time for each client. Our terminology work was limited to keeping term sheets in Excel. We knew all along that this was a rather inefficient way of operating.
What made me choose Memsource, initially, was the ease of getting started. It is completely cloud-based, so you need nothing but a web browser and a small program, the Memsource Editor that you install on your computer. They offer a free trial with full functionality. We literally had it up and running in minutes. There is a 4-minute video that explains the basics. We did not really need much more than that. We uploaded our TMX files and terminology into the system and were processing our first translation projects within a matter of days.
In our experience, Memsource is an efficient and reliable tool. Whenever we encountered a technical issue, their tech support responded extremely fast. In fact, their tech support is nothing short of remarkable. They look into each issue promptly and come up with solutions very fast. They show a genuine interest in continually improving Memsource for its users.
Most of our translators, but not all, were willing to translate with Memsource. Out of those who tried it I cannot remember a single person who complained about it or wanted to switch away from it again. Of course there are some translators who invested heavily in their own CAT tools, both financially and in terms of their learning curve, and therefore refuse working with a tool that they are not familiar with (even if it is free). For these translators we still work with Memsource, but we send them the files in XLIFF or Word format, and send along TMX files and terminology. We sacrifice some of Memsource’s functionality, but we get to keep our existing translators and still have full control of the process and of our translation assets.
The improvements in quality and cost savings have materialized instantly. We are now able to do very thorough terminology work and quality assurance steps, using Memsource’s built-in QA functions. This allows our project managers to notice problems much more easily and revert back to the translators before these issues turn into client complaints.
Also, we are able to do a much better job at the project preparation stage. Our project managers can use the pre-translation function to work on the fuzzy matches, to some extent even if they do not know the language at all! An hour or two of preparation work has saved us hundreds of dollars in translator cost, for many projects.
In addition, we are saving money at the post-translation stage because Memsource does a very good job of keeping file formats such as InDesign, FrameMaker and complex Word files intact. This reduces the time we spend on formatting work.
I can honestly say that Memsource has greatly streamlined our internal processes, improved our quality assurance and has saved as a lot of money, in just a few months. It has been an excellent investment, and I would like to express my sincere thanks to everyone at Memsource to help make this possible.
