Working as Part of the Customer's TeamsBy Volkan Güvenç, Founder — Alafranga Language Solutions
Most translation relationships start the same way. A project arrives. We quote, deliver, invoice. The client is satisfied. We move on.
That works fine for a one-off document. But it is not how the relationships that have defined Alafranga's work actually operate. |
▮What stays consistent — and why it matters
◆ We have been working with Hoogendoorn Growth Management for 15 years. 182 projects. 14 languages. Horticulture software documentation — climate control systems, greenhouse automation, cultivation management platforms — translated from Dutch into Turkish, English, and beyond.
The first project required the most setup. We built the glossary from scratch — Dutch horticultural terminology mapped into Turkish and English equivalents that did not always exist in standard dictionaries. We documented the decisions. We established the workflow. We learned how Hoogendoorn writes, what their end users need to understand, and where the terminology is non-negotiable.
Fifteen years later, that investment is still paying dividends — for them and for us. A new product module arrives. The glossary already covers 80% of the terminology. The translator already knows the platform. The PM already knows the approval process. The first delivery of a new document type takes hours, not days.
◆ Delta Plus Group is a different story — safety equipment, PPE, compliance documentation across 13 years and 291 projects. The content is regulated. Every label, every instruction sheet, every safety datasheet has to be right — not approximately right, not right in context, precisely right. When a harness instruction tells a worker how to inspect a carabiner before climbing, the translation is not a language exercise. It is a safety document.
Thirteen years means 291 opportunities to get it wrong. It also means 291 opportunities to get it right, build trust, and accumulate the kind of institutional knowledge that makes the next project faster and more accurate than the one before.
That is what long-term actually means. Not loyalty. Not habit. A working relationship where the accumulated knowledge on both sides makes every delivery better than the one before it — and where the cost of switching is not the price, but everything that would have to be rebuilt.
◆ With Toyota's Adapazarı plant, we handled Japanese, English, and Turkish across seven years of manufacturing documentation — Hoshin Kanri planning materials, Kaizen reports, production procedures. At one point, we had an interpreter on-site.
The content was terminology-dense and operationally critical. A mistranslated instruction in a production procedure is not a quality issue — it is a safety issue. The only way to manage that consistently over seven years is to build a shared knowledge base and not abandon it between projects.
We maintained a client-specific glossary, updated after every project. The same core team handled the work. When a new document type came in, we had context — we were not starting from zero.