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Why Your Translation Gets Worse When More Departments Get Involved

By Volkan Güvenç, Founder

 at Alafranga Language Solutions

 

There is a pattern we see regularly with organisations that have been growing internationally for a few years.

The engineering team has been working with one translation supplier. The legal department found another one they trust. Marketing uses a third — or a platform, or an intern who speaks the language. Each arrangement made sense at the time it was set up. Each solved an immediate problem.

Then someone notices that the product is called one thing in the German manual and something slightly different in the German marketing materials. A customer service team in Turkey is using terminology that does not match the product interface. A regulatory filing uses a term that legal approved three years ago but engineering replaced in the meantime.


The translation is not wrong, exactly. But it is not consistent. And inconsistency at scale is expensive — in correction costs, in support calls, in brand damage, and occasionally in regulatory consequences.


This is what fragmented translation management looks like from the inside. It feels manageable until it suddenly is not.

 
 
▮Why it happens
Fragmentation is the natural result of departmental autonomy without central coordination. Each team has its own priorities, its own budget, and its own definition of "good enough." When translation is treated as a procurement item rather than an operational process, the selection criteria are usually price and turnaround. Consistency and terminology governance do not appear on the purchase order.

The result is a collection of translation relationships that are each locally optimised and globally incoherent. The German manual and the German marketing materials were both translated well. They just were not translated together.
 
▮What centralisation actually means
Centralising translation does not mean taking control away from individual departments. It means establishing shared infrastructure that all departments draw from. That infrastructure has three components.

The first is a shared glossary. Every approved term — product names, technical concepts, regulatory language, brand vocabulary — captured in one place and applied consistently across every document, regardless of which department originated it or which specialist translated it. When engineering updates a term, legal and marketing get the update automatically. Not eventually. Automatically.

The second is a shared translation memory. Every approved sentence becomes an asset. When the same instruction appears in a machinery manual and a training document, it is not translated twice — it is retrieved and applied. Over time, the TM becomes an increasingly accurate representation of how your organisation communicates in each language. The more content goes through it, the more valuable it becomes.

The third is a single point of coordination. Not a single translator — a single coordinator who holds the full picture of your translation programme. Who knows which departments are active, which content types are in progress, what the current approved terminology is, and how decisions made in one part of the programme affect the others.
Without all three, centralisation is cosmetic. With all three, it is structural.