Translation Bureau Benchmarking and Comparative Analysis - Final ...

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Translation Bureau Benchmarking and Comparative Analysis• Of the eight organizations interviewed, only the three international organizations usemachine translation, with Organizations #7 and #8 using custom solutions for theirmachine translation.• In terms of benefits, the use of these tools is generally felt to have provided a tangibleincrease in productivity. A slightly more intangible benefit was an increase in theconsistency of translation.5.5 Information SecurityThe Translation Bureau manages the translation of documents classified up to and including‘Top Secret’ level. This is done primarily through the use of internal language professionals. TheBureau has also invested considerably in building specific facilities that meet the necessarysecurity requirements.Of the eight participating organizations, two handle translation of Government of Canadaclassified documents. Organization #4 is particularly interesting as it is a commercial serviceprovider that has received a facility cleared to ‘Top Secret’ and all its translators are cleared upto at least ‘Secret’. In the interview, the CEO of the organization indicated that there is nodifference in their approach to translation of classified documents. There is no extra charge toclients for providing this service. His organization’s perspective was that this service wasconsidered as essential in order to have access to this segment of the public sector market andserves as a competitive differentiator. The cost of the facility clearance has been amortized overa long period and is included in the overhead of the organization.Although not all of the organizations handled Government of Canada classified documents, eachdid have measures and guidelines in place for handling secure or highly sensitive documents.These measures were consistent between organizations, and included:• Secure or highly sensitive documents were generally translated by in-house resources;• When necessary, translation was managed by senior resources, up to and including thehead of the organization;• Staff possessed the requisite level of security clearance, or had signed some form ofconfidentiality clause or non-disclosure agreements. These requirements were usuallyextended to suppliers as well;• Restrictions on where the translation work could be performed (i.e. on-site rather thanworking from home); and• Where a document has an official security classification, policy around access andtransmission of the information are followed (i.e. document encryption, no transmissionvia e-mail, work performed on a secure workstation).5.6 Multilingual ServicesAlthough the majority of its volume is between English and French, the Bureau does provideservices in over 100 languages and dialects, including Aboriginal languages. This service ismanaged primarily through the use of external suppliers. Estimated to be less than 5%, it doesnot represent a significant percentage of the Bureau’s current volume.Among the comparator organizations, three of the organizations did not deal with multilingualtranslation at all. Three of the remaining organizations only dealt with multilingual translationPage 34 of 43
Translation Bureau Benchmarking and Comparative Analysison an occasional basis and relied on external resources to provide this expertise. OnlyOrganization #7 and Organization #8 provided a sufficient volume of multilingual service toretain in-house expertise. A key issue in managing the translation to and from a large number oflanguages is that the number of potential language pairs can grow very quickly. Organizations#7 and #8 managed this complexity by restricting the source language to one or two workinglanguages. This restriction dramatically reduces the number of potential language pairs thatmust be staffed.Although it was not one of the eight comparator organizations, an interesting Canadian exampleof multilingual translation can be found with the City of Toronto. As Canada’s largest city,Toronto has a very multi-cultural demographic. In order to support its delivery of services andcommunication with an increasingly diverse population, the City of Toronto has leveraged‘Google Translate’ to provide real-time translation of its website (http://www.toronto.ca/) intoover 51 languages.5.7 Social MediaAs stated in Section 4.6, there is little evidence of the use of translation services for social media.The organizations interviewed indicated that the translation responsibility rests with theorganization that was creating the content and not with the translation services group. This isgenerally the communications group of the organization. Organization #4, the commercialservices organization, did not view this as an area that presented a sound business case forinvestment, and felt that it was an area better addressed internally within an organization due tothe speed required as well as range of potential material that would need translation. While notpurely in the area of social media, Organization #8 did provide some support for websitetranslation, however in their view, the limiting factor on timely delivery was the speed of thewebmaster rather than the translation.Discussion on social media during Executive Workshop #2 suggested that translation for socialmedia as a service that was closer in nature to interpretation or adaptation rather than puretranslation. This was due to the preference for speed while capturing the essence of the messagerather than providing a purely faithful and accurate translation of text.5.8 SummaryThis section summarizes the above data into a single table, as presented in Table 13.It is important to note that the information presented can be considered from two perspectives.The first perspective is to highlight how the Bureau compares to other organizations. The secondperspective is to provide some context to the comparator data so that readers of this report canunderstand the differences between organizations and the difficulties in making a directcomparison between the organizations. As such, consideration of both the similarities and thedifferences between organizations should be taken into account when reviewing Table 13.Page 35 of 43
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