Best Practices for Managing Large Translation Projects in Crowdin?

General Questions
1

Hello everyone,

I have been using Crowdin for a few translation projects recently but now I am tasked with managing a much larger project involving multiple languages and contributors. I’m looking for advice on best practices for efficiently managing larger projects on the platform.

  1. How do you typically organize your project to keep track of all files and translations: ??
  2. What is the best way to communicate with multiple translators and proofreaders within Crowdin: ??
  3. Are there any specific features or workflows in Crowdin that you recommend to streamline the process: ??
  4. How do you handle quality control to ensure consistency across languages: ??

I would love to hear from anyone who’s worked on larger projects. Your insights will be really helpful as I want to make sure things run smoothly and stay on schedule. I have also read this blog https://crowdin.com/blog/2023/07/27/translation-management-system-rpa/ it helped me a little but now looking for some more tips and advice.

Thanks in advance !!

With Regards,
Derek Theler

2

Hi Derek,

We’re here to help you! The workflows our customers set up widely vary, let us know if you would like a quick call to talk about your needs and the options of workflows you can set up.

Large projects are handled in the same way as small ones. However, general recommendations would be

  1. Keep the original data structure in the Crowdin project. For example, if you have 1000 markdown files, they are probably sorted into directories. Make sure you keep the exact same structure. The location of a file is part of a context given to the linguist. If you use an integration with a CMS, for example, Crowdin will do this for you automatically.

A nice preview of the translation progress is also available out of the box.

  1. Companies would typically communicate via tasks. Whenever you decide to do a piece of work, you would create a task in Crowdin with a scope of work for the selected linguist. In addition to the real-time translation progress for your languages/files, you would receive translation progress for that scope of work within a task. It’s quite common for localization managers to have an additional communication channel, depending on what works for you and your linguists. This could be email threads, a discord channel, etc.

  2. There are a lot of them. If you want to automate some of your work, for example creating tasks for the new content, or automatically pre-translating a new content (if you expect to use MTPE), there are either native features or applications for that.

  3. Having a glossary for consistency is great. If you expect to have more than one linguist per language, it’s probably a must. There are applications such as Terminology Extractors to help you build a glossary. If you’re on Crowdin Enterprise, we’re releasing a new AI terminology extractor this month.

If you’re planning to use proofreading, that’s another great way to improve quality and consistency.

I would recommend encouraging linguists to raise an issue in Crowdin Editor whenever they need help. For example, if they are not sure about the context or how to translate, or if they have found an error in the text they are translating. Then use the Issue Manager app or the Slack for Managers app to keep track of these issues

Hope our suggestions helped you!