Language Assets: Digital Assets are a Necessity in Today’s Globalized World

Digitization is a given in this day and age, and it has become both a turning point and a force that can sustain companies moving forward. Any company that can digitize both its operations and its important institutional information can a gain an edge in an ever more competitive market.
By their very nature, international companies must have a broader vision. Both the companies themselves and their cooperative partners need to keep pace with digitization. That is where translation becomes relevant, precisely because of its power to span markets.
So, the question becomes: how does a company identify which translation partners (or in-house translators) are capable of digitalization? Or, how does one know when a company’s language services have actually gone through digitization? The answer, perhaps, is in the concept of language assets.

But what are language assets?

As early as the 1990s when the tech industry was in the ascendant, the translation industry joined in the digital revolution. Digitization of language assets is where that revolution began.
The massive volume of data or corpora that in-house or out-of-house translation teams establish, collect, accumulate, and organize over long periods of time are what we call language assets. Professional terminology, previous translations, style guides for copywriting and translation—all of these are perfect examples of language assets.
Not long ago, translation teams had to retain such information, though it was not actually used to a great extent. That was the status quo up until the 90s, when Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) tools entered the fray. Such tools have become ever more mature and usable, and with the wide-scale integration of computers into every aspect of life and commercial services, once dormant language assets have been revitalized.
What makes CAT tools useful for translation is that they provide a dual-language work environment where translators have a better connection to the resources of both languages. But CAT tools go beyond just identifying equivalences for the work at hand—they have a function that can retain sentences of both languages (source and target) that have been checked for accuracy and use them to make future translations faster and more accurate. That function is what is known as a translation memory (TM). The basic unit of a translation memory is the sentence. Smaller units that make a sentence, such as keywords, terms, and phrases, are also usable: they form the basic unit of a term base (TB). Linguistic assets are digitalized with CAT tools, translation memories, and term bases.

What makes digitalized language assets useful?

The “assets” of “language assets” is the pertinent part of the term; by “assets” we mean that the linguistic resources of the company can be seen to have value in the same way that the physical assets of the company have value. Digitizing these resources makes them easier to save and benefit from later, just like depositing into a savings account. Just like a savings account, digitization of language resources quantifies your assets and allows you to keep track of input and output. And, as your assets grow, you can derive interest from your assets.

Digitization also empowers language assets with more applications for use. It is a given that digitalizing your information makes it easier and faster to search through and manage; but that is not all that digitization can do:

1.  It significantly boosts efficiency: When using CAT tools, whenever new translations have content that is the same or similar to previously vetted content in the TMs and TBs, the translator will see that content and can use, alter, improve upon, and save the results, thereby ensuring better results that improve over time.
2. It stabilizes quality and consistency: CAT tools come equipped with QA tools, which allow checking whether the translator has followed the TM and TB content, and if not, it can identify there they differ. These tools play an important part in the translation, editing, and proofreading (TEP) process and ensure quality that stays consistent and stable. This helps ensure that a company’s brand can remain strong in multiple languages, in multiple markets.
3. It scales: Language assets can be used as the basis for development with other translation technologies, including machine translation (MT). As a company scales, its language assets must also keep pace. Growth is an opportunity to use the latest in linguistic technology to communicate quickly on a global scale.

The world of today moves bigger and faster than ever. Be it cross national communication or marketing and sales, material for translation increases, as does its scale. Keeping pace with fast-moving clients is difficult. Complete and comprehensive digitization is the solution.
After their digitization, the proper management of language assets is necessary to enhance the quality and quantity of assets while also responding quickly to client requirements. Imprecise management of a company’s language assets is not just ill-advised, it can even lead to PR disasters. That topic will be discussed in detail in the article “Language Asset Management: Essential to Enhancing Quality in a Globalized Environment.”

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