How can a language service provider help multinational companies with human resources translation?
As corporate businesses constantly adapt to the fluctuating market landscape and digital-driven environment, human resource management has been evolving quickly to meet the needs. And that includes the increasing need for human resources translations. While the survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers shows that 41% of human resources managers feel confident that their departments can navigate the technology landscape, only a quarter of business leaders agree with it.
The human resources department is already facing massive responsibilities daily, such as overseeing leadership and staff development, hiring and retention of the employees, and organizational effectiveness. Now, they also find themselves concerning less about recruitment and more about keeping up with company expansions. While policies remain at the head office level, the human resources department must think more strategically to support change management. One of which is the need to deal with information that requires disseminating into different languages at a localized level over various countries.
How should expanding or multinational companies tackle human resources translations?
The hiring process can already be lengthy when recruitment only happens at a local level. Once international candidates come into play, it only gets more complicated. The human resources department suddenly needs to figure out an on-brand recruiting message that can attract talents globally. They need to confirm that personal documents for VISA applications, such as school transcripts and employment contracts, are accurately translated to fulfill legal requirements.
The translation process doesn’t stop there. To ensure new team members are fully acquainted with their role, onboarding documents such as codes of conduct, employee handbooks, policies, and standard operating procedures must be accurately translated. Not only does this affect the organization’s culture and level of productivity, but it also has a direct effect on the retention rate.
With the new normal of working from home and the addition of e-learning, human resources managers find themselves facing a lot more workload. That includes assembling training programs, e-learning courses, and behavioral frameworks that involve technical terms and details. There is simply no way for them to translate everything on their own.
What should multinational companies do to best tackle human resources translations?
While some companies have recognized the need to standardize their important documents across different languages, others are still looking for an easy way out. We believe the best solution is to partner with a professional translation partner, and here are the reasons why:
The cost of keeping everything in English
Companies might survive with master documents in English only, but they would fail to connect with non-English native or speaking staff. A company that embraces diversity and inclusion is how it can develop a sense of belonging. Without it, it may jeopardize different perspectives and opinions through cultural differences.
The problem with doing it in-house
Assigning someone from the company to do it in their spare time is a waste of effort. Company documents are often bound to legality, and precision is a must. We know of a client who had an internal staff translate a piece of human resources document. That document would have taken us a few days to do but ended up taking them a month to complete. The amount of research and proper terminology is time-consuming for people outside of the profession to do. It could potentially delay or harm the start of a relationship with a potential client, partner, or user.
The inconsistency with local vendors
Different handlers could interpret documents differently, and this is not ideal. Costs end up being different every time, and there is no uniformity in processes. That causes mixed messages to the vendors or the operational team, resulting in decreased efficiency.
The importance of confidentiality
Legal and personal documents should not be translated by internal staff until they are officially shared and released. Alongside urgent timelines, it is best to outsource the project and let a professional translation partner handle the work completely.
With all that said, multinationals and companies expanding needs to achieve speed, accuracy, and cost-efficiency with their human resources translations. And at DataSource, we know just what it takes to keep the human resources department up to speed.
As an external agency, we will have the resources and capacity to build glossaries that follow company guidelines from the head office. Our work maintains the brand tone across the board and we assign each document to a respective expert translator. All of the translation histories are logged for any subsequent updates.
We have worked with service companies who offer visa applications or relocation packages where we translated batches of employee documents for different corporate clients. Our ability to translate a high volume in little time comes from our rich experience in translating highly technical documentation. We analyze and clean client’s source documents from formatting issues, resulting in 50k words of translation in just three days. We also cater to typesetting requirements and proofreading. That ensures the final product is as perfect as it gets.
Our experienced industry experts and linguists work together to provide quick and accurate translation for a broad spectrum of companies and organizations. We hope by providing best practices, we can help corporate businesses and organizations succeed. For more details, visit us at https://www.datasourcegroup.com/translation/.
