When it comes to driving a large global health strategy, especially in countries that lack adequate healthcare, BMJ knew how vital it was to provide in-language content. Using their roster of native speaking doctors who worked on revising all the translated content in their respective languages, BMJ knew how complicated their process was getting.
With so many moving parts to each piece of translated content, they needed to find a solution to help scale their operation.
The Challenge: Simplifying a Complicated Process
- Convoluted translation process. Working in an email-based workflow, the BMJ content team struggled through their manual translation process. Busy sending Google documents by mail, translations were slow to get to the approval process, preventing any scalable growth.
- Slow to deliver vital content. Due to the critical nature of BMJ’s source content, the content team required translation review by physicians in language. Reviewing translated work from several different translation agencies and sending files back and forth from translators to reviewers created bottlenecks in publishing.
- High-volume translation. With each new language needing translation of up to 4 million words in less than a year, BMJ needed their translation provider to be able to handle their volume, while keeping costs as low as possible.
The Solution: Smartling
Using the Smartling cloud-based translation management system, BMJ realized the following benefits:
- Localization infrastructure. BMJ’s primary goal was to create a fully automated translation process, transitioning from an email-based workflow. With their new automated workflow, BMJ’s content team eliminated the need to manually handle files. This new process includes selecting content, creating a job and setting a deadline.
- Decreased time to market. In less than a year, BMJ cut down their time to publication by 54%, from 13 weeks to 6 weeks. This enabled their team to quickly reach markets and push more content out to their audience.
- Reduced costs. Leveraging Smartling’s centralized, cloud-based translation memory, BMJ has already saved 21% in a reduction of overall new translation volume. Smartling’s translation memory knows to leverage the most recent translations, allowing for the best possible quality.
- Reduced project management. With Smartling, BMJ has realized a 75% reduction of project management efforts through real-time updates and reporting. With a content team that used to spend a majority of their time on translations, BMJ is now able to focus on development tasks. With an automated process, they can now dedicate time to working with providers to deliver content on time.
