Vendor Management Training

Introduction about vendor managemen

Introduction for vendor Management

VM Practices

1- Localization Procurement
2- Vendor Management System
3- Resource Management
 1- Localization Procurement

Vendor manager is the first liaison in the translation business, who should guarantee quality, availability,
capacity, and the cost of the suppliers; VM is responsible to find and settle the deal with them

The key to unleashing the value of procuring translation and localization services are first, clearly
understanding your company’s translation and localization costs and capabilities, and second, in finding
the right partner with the right blend of skills and expertise to match your company’s situation.

Buyers have nowadays a choice to make a change and become more cost effective when contracting
translation and localization commodity services, but that really depends on their supply chain strategy,
how close they work with related cost owners such as marketing, translation, technology departments
and gain trust from stakeholders, also the way a company uses language technology to reduce
production and project management costs, the way they diversify their suppliers and many other
variables affect the procurement of translation and localization services.

Almost all international companies have decided to outsource the localization of their products and
services to external Language Service Providers (LSP). When you are starting this process, how do
you select the ideal partner?
 Localization Procurement

LSP diverse in 2 kinds, freelancers and Agencies (SLVs, and MLVs). Since the world is shrinking in size
thanks to the internet activity and international communication, geographical proximity is no longer
a need for successful localization. The number of languages pairs, the fluctuation in volumes, the
variety of industry fields, tools and technologies make it impossible for a company, as large it might
be, to rely on internal resources only for the actual translation, linguistic Quality Assurance (QA) or
application testing. That means that the quality delivered by a localization company depends on the
capabilities of the external actors which are called vendors/freelancers who are The bottom line for
procurement professionals and allow us to impact the profit margin versus what is required to
achieve the same effect focusing purely on revenue growth.
Freelancers must guarantee the ability to deliver turn key products within the in country sense in an
optimum price.
A well organized selection process should start with a definition of the business areas, subject matters,
main language combinations, types of services that need to be covered and expected volumes.
The purpose of vendor selection is to create and develop a pool of new referenced resources that are
ready and prepared to start at any time.
When Vendor selection starts, their should be some vital documentation (i.e. Resume, cover letter,
references, and any endorsement).
 Localization Procurement

In all the process way there are necessary criteria should always include:
1- Native Speaker
2- Relevant education to the Translation industry/Sufficient experience in translation business
3- Familiarity with CAT tools and credentials to handle different kind of files.

Appropriate vendor management practices provide only the necessary information at the right time
that will allow a vendor to better service your needs. This may include limited forecast information,
new product launches, changes in design and expansion or relocation changes, just to name a few.
Good vendor management dictates that negotiations are completed in good faith. Look for negotiation
points that can help both sides accomplish their goals. A strong-arm negotiation tactic will only
work for so long before one party walks away from the deal.
 2- Vendor management System

During the selection process, translators pass various stages before being authorized to work on a
project. Preceding from “Candidate” to “Approved”, the successful vendor will eventually be
admitted for a probationary period. The selection process may last several weeks, and a vendor
manager may have dozens of candidates at various stages. Due to the large amount of data stored
during this selection process, the use of an efficient database is vital. As well as providing each
candidate's status classification, the database should make it possible to produce analytical reports
on each translator. In addition, some of the data should be accessible to localization Project
Managers.
Creating the database of vendors should contain; name, status ( contacted, tested, approved, rejected),
address, contact information, bank details, and language combinations with rates.
These information are essentials to be able to contact the vendor and to be coupled with the PM.
Else more, to have accurate information we should determine the CAT tool, the expertise area for this
translator so we will be able to select the right one.
 3- Resource Management

The resource management activity initiates whenever the translator starts to work with the company
and produce.
The vendor manager starts to be coupled with the project manger in this stage to evaluate 3 main
activities about the translator:
1- Task quality: which is concerned about the translation quality.
2- Service quality: which as a general evaluation for the translator qualification, i.e., communication,
responses, troubleshooting.
3- commitment to deadlines.
These points will draw the translator managing stage, will be in his report and been evaluated in order
to determine the best vendors.
When the quality decreases we should contact the supplier to know the reasons. Potential problems
can be avoided without any disturbance to the project flow. These feedbacks should help in the
vendor database development.
Several issues impact the translation whether it’s Human Translation or Machine Translation.
Association like LISA and SAE had drawn the quality metrics and these metrics had been summarized
to focus on 5 factors which may affect and ruin the translation quality:
 Resource Management

• Terminology: which concerns the appropriate naming of the domain concepts. It is not restricted to
the domain nomenclature since it includes concepts for actions and events as well.
• Grammar: which is concerned with the grammatical fidelity of the information objects, or the text
between SGML tags.
• Style: which is concerned with general writing guidelines for technical information and specialized
corporate writing styles based on company-specific writing guidelines for technical information.
This could be also a controlled language (CL) in the spirit of the air and space industry (Simplified
English and AECMA) for the source language and the target language (cf. [Godden, 1998]). It also
includes localization specific aspects such as the proper selection of the honorific level for Asian
languages.
• Content: which is concerned with the semantic fidelity of the information objects (or text, see
above).
• Structure: which is concerned with the SGML/XML level of the information objects and the
representation of the textual units in terms of, for example, an appropriate code page selection.
 Resource Management

For each of these quality factors we define the following five quality criteria. It should be noted that
these quality criteria can be also applied to the source (base) language product. This then makes
our quality model sort of generic or universal for human language products:
• Accuracy: The capability of the translation product to provide the right results or effects, i.e.
process oriented
service descriptions.
• Compliance: The capability of the translation product to adhere to standards, conventions or
regulations in laws and similar descriptions. This also includes a so-called corporate style.
• Consistency: The capability of the translation product to maintain a specific level of human
language
performance and human language competence.
• Understandability: The capability of the translation product to enable the user, i.e. the workshop
mechanic in our domain, to understand and fulfill the described processes and procedures, i.e. the
suitability regarding particular tasks and conditions of use.
• Interpretation: The capability of the translation product to provide the user with the right and
unambiguous semantic content.
Most of quality metric proposals consist of eight classes:
• 1. Wrong term (WT)
• 2. Omission (OM)
• 3. Grammatical error related to word structure, agreement and part of speech (GE)
• 4. Wrong word order (WO)
• 5. Misspelling (SP)
• 6. Punctuation error (PE)
• 7. Superfluous text (SF)
• 8. Miscellaneous error (ME)

It is intended that a human classifies these errors into the above eight classes. In a second step she then
categorizes the errors into Serious (s) or Minor (m), and in a third step each error is assigned a
weight between one (1) and five (5). 5 corresponds to a very serious error and 1 indicates an error
with a minimum of consequences for the service operation.
To reflect the above considerations we have established the following metric (first part) which is a slight
redefinition of the original SAE J2450 classes:
 Resource Management

• Wrong or unapproved term, abbreviation and acronym. the terminological level in its genuine
sense, i.e. we do not include function words. In addition to genuine terminography we include
terms denoting actions and events. Because of this terminology orientation this class also covers
semantic errors on the conceptual level as it is also intended in the SAE classification. This class is
denoted WT.
• Omission of text and of graphics with text elements
a. A continuous block of text in the source language has no counterpart in the target language text and,
as a result, the semantics of the source text is absent in the translation;
b. A graphic which contains source language text has been deleted from the target language deliverable.
• Superfluous text
a. A source term is assigned the wrong part of speech in its target language counterpart.
b. The target text contains an incorrect phrase structure, e.g., a relative clause when a verb phrase is
needed.
c. The target language words are correct, but in the wrong linear order according to the syntactic rules
of the target language.
 Resource Management

• Wrong word order:

a. An error of incorrect word structure has occurred if an otherwise correct target language word (or
term) is expressed in an incorrect morphological form, e.g., case, gender, number, tense, prefix,
suffix, infix, or any other inflection.
b. An error of agreement has occurred when two or more target language words disagree in any form of
inflection as would be required by the grammatical rules of that language.
• Misspelling:
a. Violates the spelling as stated in a client glossary,
b. Violates the accepted norms for spelling in the target language,
c. Is written in an incorrect or inappropriate writing system for the target language.
• Punctuation error: Style violation of a specific set of writing rules including controlled language
use, honorifics and localization issues (writing system or code page). This class is denoted SV.
• Miscellaneous error: Any linguistic error related to the target language text which is not clearly
attributable to the other categories listed previously should be classified as a miscellaneous error.
This rule recognizes that not all errors fall neatly into the other six error categories, and that some
evaluators may proofread a translation and recognize it as clearly wrong, yet not be able to say
precisely what it is that is wrong.