Core Skills

Wordbank has six main areas of expertise:

It is this combination of skills that enables us to help our clients achieve their goals of quality communication, rapid response and cost-effectiveness in local markets.

Linguistic quality management:

  • The Wordbank production and project management team consists entirely of multilingual graduates with excellent communication, client care and IT skills. Approximately 60% of Wordbank staff are non-English nationals.
  • We operate rigorous qualification, selection and performance monitoring processes for our network of more than 2,500 translators.
  • Our multistage localization processes incorporate terminology and translation memory management in addition to in-country translation, editing, internal revision, proofreading, and local checking/approval. Each process is tailored to the specific needs of the client and the content being localized.
  • Our quality management processes are ISO 9001 certified and supported by a proprietary workflow production system designed for complex localization project management.

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Complex marcoms localization project management:

  • We regularly undertake major complex localization projects many of which are in more than 40 languages, are multipiece, multimedia, and generated by more than one source or agency.
  • We deliver more than 1,500 projects every year localizing websites, advertising campaigns, brochures, direct mail campaigns, training manuals, presentations, voiceovers, packaging copy, databases and Flash animations.
  • We offer our clients the opportunity to track the progress of their projects online through our workflow system.
  • We regularly contribute articles to industry media, present at localization industry conferences on Best Practice for marcoms localization project management and participate in industry standards development.

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Comprehensive language typesetting and publishing expertise:

  • Wordbank's publishing team is expert in the complex process of typesetting languages. We regularly typeset and publish in more than 40 languages including:
    • Western, Scandinavian, Eastern European
    • Asia-Pacific and Americas
    • Bidirectional languages such as Hebrew and Arabic.
  • We also have experience of working in all the major graphic handling packages and have formally evaluated the following software packages in terms of their use and suitability for localization: QuarkXPress, Illustrator, Photoshop, FreeHand and PageMaker.
  • We can also deliver major productivity gains for our clients' localization projects through a suite of tools that we have developed in-house to automatically manipulate text and graphics; provide extraction, reinsertion and copying functionality; and avoid the need for error-prone manual cutting and pasting.

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Innovative development of localization tools:

  • Wordbank has created a range of tools to process text content from a variety of file formats, in order to streamline the localization process. Our tools deliver cost and time-savings by reducing the need for application-specific skills in our linguistic suppliers, leaving them to focus on linguistic quality. These tools include:
  • WordWeb: extracts and reinserts text from virtually all types of tagged file formats commonly used for web applications (html, asp, jsp, php and xml). WordWeb can process any web file structure, regardless of size, volume or complexity.
  • WordBase: working directly with content in SQL-based databases and delimited database exports, this tool enables easy localization of structured data. WordBase provides an interface to specific columns requiring localization and offers de-duplication tools, reducing costs by eliminating field repetition.
  • TextDaemon: a template-driven automatic typesetting tool for Quark XPress documents, TextDaemon offers a suite of productivity-enhancing features allowing us to deliver multiple-language design up to 75% faster than traditional typesetting methods.
  • WordPoint: simplifying the cost-estimation process and speeding up the localization of PowerPoint presentations, WordPoint separates content for localization from the design, reversing the process prior to delivery.
  • In addition to the tools listed above, Wordbank has provided multiple customised applications for improving the efficiency of the localization process for a range of project types across a variety of clients.

    This has involved everything from small project-specific code to extensive applications designed to integrate with our clients' processes and systems. We have worked with clients on a variety of Content Management Systems, including Documentum, Microsoft CMS, TeamSite and several proprietary systems, as well as Globalization Management Systems such as Trados GXT, to help them achieve maximum benefits in terms of content re-use, without compromising the quality of their localized content.

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Linguistic resource recruitment and performance management:

  • A dedicated and motivated Wordbank Translator Network Management team is responsible for maintaining and managing the database of around 2,500 linguistic resources worldwide and for allocating and coordinating projects into over 72 languages.
  • We recruit in-country linguistic resources by testing them to meet our criteria for knowledge of a specialist area and style as well as grammar and spelling.
  • We create client-specific teams of translators and editors based on their qualifications and experience to match the client's profile.
  • To ensure that Wordbank consistently meets our clients' expectations, we continually monitor the quality of the work supplied by our linguistic resources.
  • We publish regular newsletters aimed at our core 600 linguistic suppliers to build and maintain a close working relationship, by sharing information to help them understand and appreciate our common goal.

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Terminology and translation memory database build and management:

  • A dedicated and highly skilled Wordbank Terminology Management team is responsible for multilingual glossary and translation memory database design, update and management.
  • We create client-specific database structures to both control and automate the input and update of source and target terms. These can then be easily controlled to ensure communication consistency across materials and languages, while also enabling our clients to benefit from cost savings through content re-use.
  • We carry out the identification and classification of key terminology and phrases that are of critical importance to the brand, product messages and positioning, while ensuring the security and integrity of the data.
  • To ensure that our clients can have access to the latest terminology at all times, we offer security-protected, online glossary search access to their particular database. This ensures that we can respond immediately to any communications consistency queries.
  • We also offer to consolidate existing glossaries from different sources and manage them centrally in one database, designing and implementing an appropriate database structure and ensuring consistency and integrity of data, and giving access to all users with client authorisation.

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“ Bringing home the global message ”

Wordbank staff