The localization industry is largely unregulated at national and international levels. Within this landscape, international standards of best practice define industry regulation as ensuring that work is assigned to professionals with the required competencies. Standards of best practice clearly assign responsibility for this regulation to LSPs, who in turn pass this responsibility on to the project and vendor managers who assign localization-related work. As the on-the-ground regulators, project and vendor managers must be aware of the impact of their project assignments, since translations and related language work are core components of both the primary language product delivered to the client and the highly valuable bilingually-aligned content that is leveraged into all future projects for a client through translation memories or machine translation.

During this course, students will learn a gold standard workflow for vendor recruitment and onboarding that incorporates the automation necessary to drive efficiency, the data security necessary to protect confidential intellectual property, and the evaluation capabilities necessary to cultivate vendor databases that produce consistent quality results. Students will explore strategies for customizing workflows for specific languages and subject fields, and workflows that will be discussed include those related to screening, testing, onboarding, and performance management.