Translation is a supply chain. You have content that needs to reach translators, go through review, and come back in a state that's ready to ship - across potentially dozens of language pairs, each with its own resource pool, quality profile, and cost structure. Managing that well is a discipline in itself, and it's one that tends to get underestimated until the invoices pile up or the quality starts slipping in markets you can't read yourself.
Finding the right translation partners isn't just about rates. It's about matching content types to the right kind of linguists, setting expectations that are specific enough to be useful, and building a feedback loop that actually improves quality over time instead of just flagging problems after the fact. A gaming company needs different translators than a healthcare platform, even for the same language - and the way you brief, review, and manage them should reflect that.
I help companies build and organize their translation supply chain from the buyer's side. That includes defining selection criteria for LSPs and freelancers, running structured evaluation rounds, setting up onboarding processes that get new linguists productive quickly, and designing the quality frameworks and SLAs that keep everything on track once the work is flowing. If you already have vendors in place but aren't sure whether you're getting the value you should be, an audit of the current setup is often the most useful starting point.
Cost management is part of this too, but not in the sense of squeezing rates. It's about understanding where your translation budget actually goes, whether you're paying for work that could be handled differently - through MT post-editing, translation memory leverage, or smarter content reuse - and whether the split between your vendors makes sense for what each one is good at. The goal is spending the right amount in the right places, not just spending less.
Because this comes from an in-house perspective, the emphasis is always on building a vendor structure that serves your team's needs - not one that's convenient for the vendors. I've managed translator networks across gaming, telecom, e-commerce, and health tech, and the common thread is that a well-organized supply chain is one where the localization team spends its time on decisions, not on chasing people for deliveries.