In Localization Project Management class, I had a chance to build up my first language service company from scratch, with my awesome team members: Helen Jung, Chris Healy, Muge Zhang, Jiyi Zeng and Isabella Sun. It’s definitely one of my best experience in MIIS. We named our baby — GalaXync. We’re here to be your bridge across linguistic divides, connecting you to an audience of millions around the world.
We chose WordPress to build up our official website. Here goes our mission and vision page.
Our Mission –
GalaXync is a multi-language vendor that specializes in three East Asian languages: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Our executive team firmly stands behind the idea that no matter where one is from, we can synchronize any form of content to be relevant and enjoyable to natives of other parts of the world. Composed of expert linguists and project managers with years of combined translation, localization, and consulting experience from a multitude of industries, GalaXync is the best partner to launch your company into today’s ever-competitive, ever-changing global market.
Our Vision –
GalaXync strives to be the bridge connecting everyone in different parts of the galaxy and close the linguistic or cultural gaps between them. While our focus is on East Asia, we hope to continuously grow our services, customer base, and areas of expertise, becoming the world’s largest localization services provider with no language left behind. Contact us or visit us in our office, where our team is taking one step closer every day to our goal of bringing worlds together.
After rounds of discussion, we settled up a standardized translation and localization workflow goes as followed.
- Preparation
- Inquiry: The first thing that happens in any project is that you reach out to us! One of our account managers will then meet with you to find out how we can help you best. What’s the scope of the project? What audience are we helping you reach? Do you have any budgetary or time constraints? With this information in hand, we’ll help your project go from impossible to possible and kick off a rewarding relationship for both of us.
- File analysis: The next thing we’ll need is the files you want to be translated. Our hardworking staff of engineers will analyze the files to create a word count and then prepare them for translation, which will make our translation efficient and keep your files safe.
- Team assembly: The project manager will determine the best way to meet your translation goals, assemble a crack-team of our best translators, and create a timeline. Other companies might wait until after the contract is signed to assemble a team, but we will never tell you we can take on a project before we know we have the exact right people to do it. With a full-professional, in-house group, we can assure the quality of our translations. Plus, if you know who’s working on your product, you can rest easy knowing it’s in good hands.
- Initiation: The engineers and the project manager send their details to the account manager, who uses this information to compile a quote ( Click here to see a quote sample of a given project: Quote Sample ). The account manager then sends this quote to you, including a detailed breakdown of the various costs that will depend on the nature of the project, its size, and its speed. If you like what you see, we’ll write up a contract and sign it with you.
- Translation
- Getting the project to the team: Congratulations! The localization of your product is now officially underway! The project manager distributes the files for translation, a translation memory (a fancy tool that keeps us consistent and efficient), glossaries, style sheets, and any extra references you provide to us.
- Translation: Our team of translators works together to translate the text into the language(s) you need (be it Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or English) and deliver the completed translation back to the project manager right on time!
- Editing & proofreading: The project manager will get the translations to our editors, who will compare the translations with the original text to make sure that all of your content is retransmitted faithfully. Additionally, our proofreaders will conduct a second round of editing, this time to make sure that the translations are good quality, effective text in the target language.
- Re-assembling the files: Once everything is up to par, our engineers reverse the process they performed in the beginning, putting the new translations back into your full product.
- Review & Delivery
- Quality assurance: Once the files are ready, we will make sure that the final product works, testing for bugs and triple-checking that the translations are effective in context. If you agree, we will invite third-party reviewers to review the final product. Of course, you will also give us your input!
- Delivery: Once everything is just the way you need it, we will deliver the freshly-localized product to you, ready to release to your international audience.
- Invoice: At this point, you will confirm receipt and we’ll send an invoice to you, detailing the rates and costs indicated in the contract, along with any changes that were made along the way.
- Feedback & evaluation: To continue improving and refining our localization services, we’ll request feedback from you, and debrief among ourselves to determine what was successful and what created problems. Hopefully, you enjoyed your experience with us enough that we have the pleasure of getting to do it all over again with you in the future!
We designed our file system to manage tons of files, click here to see how it looks like (Click here): File System
To ensure the unrivaled quality of our service, we also worked out a vendor recruiting process, which includes three parts: Resource Evaluation, Language Evaluation, Onboarding and Welcoming (Click here): Recruiting Process
We used Basecamp to track our project and ensure good communication among one another. We used ProjectLibre to schedule our workflow as followed (Click here): Schedule
As a for-profit entity, it’s always vital to engage and convince your clients, making them buy your service. Here is a case pitch to show how we demonstrated ourselves to a client (Click here): GalaXync Pitch
The whole process is an engaging journey for me to walk through and understand how language industry works as a “professional” from a holistic viewpoint. And more importantly, how to be part of a team, effectively communicate with other team members, learn from others and collaborate with others. In the business world, many things need to be written down in a professional manner. I’m willing to go under the surface of project management and explore more.
Note: All mentioned documents are designed and written by our whole team: Helen Jung, Chris Healy, Muge Zhang, Jiyi Zeng, Tianlin Li and Isabella Sun