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 long-term actually means
We worked with HI-REZ Studios for four years. Every month, a new content cycle for SMITE or Paladins — patch notes, in-game strings, marketing copy, community content. Same translator throughout. Same project manager. Same glossary, updated after every delivery.
The first cycle took the longest to set up. After that, it got faster every time — not because we cut corners, but because we did not have to rebuild context from scratch. The translator knew the game. The PM knew the approval chain. The glossary carried the decisions we had already made together.
That is what working as part of a client's team looks like in practice. Not a philosophy. A workflow.
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▮What stays consistent — and why it matters
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.