SUPPLIERS

The nature of the language industry makes it almost impossible to rely exclusively on in-house resources for all languages—global cooperation is at the very core of the industry.

The supply chain is in our view one of the five pillars of the overall holistic approach. At Logrus IT we strongly believe that quality and stable performance in the language industry originate upstream, with translators, editors, proofers, quality and terminology experts. No tools or processes will rectify resource-related problems, like suppliers who are improperly selected, qualified, trained, or compensated.

At Logrus IT, our goal is providing complete, competent, and robust coverage of dozens of popular and rare languages—and only a part of this coverage is provided by in-house resources.

We invest in long-term partnerships, which is crucial to ensuring stable, consistent, quality-oriented production upstream

• We diligently nurture our long-term ties and typically cooperate with our suppliers for at least 6-8 years.
• We’d rather pay our preferred suppliers a little more and reduce our operating margin because we want to be sure the suppliers we have all treat our projects with due diligence.
• Logrus IT takes extensive measures to pay all suppliers on time. In our opinion, this is one of the key areas where companies can inadvertently alienate quality suppliers and where a bad history/reputation can have major long-term effects.
• Our vendor management team continuously works with partners, ensuring that we quickly address all concerns and provide required training in a timely manner.
• We relentlessly monitor, train, and rate all of our suppliers. At Logrus IT, vendor changes are very rare. If possible, we’d rather invest our energy in the upkeep and preservation of our existing experience, understanding, and training.
• Logrus IT only works with reputable, stable, scalable, tested in-country resources.
• We avoid any untested, obscure, or suspiciously cheap providers. Low rates come at the steep price of substandard results!

Each area involves certain production costs, and if supplier rates significantly undercut the market, it is typically a solid indicator of trouble brewing below the surface. It could be a tiny team with no flexibility or scalability, or a group of loosely connected individuals with no adequate management, complete lack of quality control or processes in place, a moonlighting amateur with no experience, a company that uses black financial schemes, etc. Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of this, and the result is always the same: this type of supplier inevitably fails at the least opportune moment, when it’s critical to deliver good quality on time. We’re not interested in betting our chips on this sort of game at Logrus IT.

We work only with direct suppliers who provide language services such as translation, editing, proofing, terminology management, or language quality assurance

We explicitly prohibit chain subcontracting (i.e. where our suppliers outsource part of the work without our knowledge or control). Uncontrollable subcontracting erodes control over resources. It negatively effects communication speed, introduces distortions, slows down turnaround time and threatens overall production stability. Any discovered violations can result in supplier agreement termination.

We continue to build on an already diverse, flexible network of language resources

• We offer a set of language skills going far beyond translation or editing

Logrus IT prides itself in providing unmatched terminology creation and maintenance and language quality assurance (LQA) services. Building these solutions required selecting the most qualified and experienced resources in each market and providing special training.

While almost any terminologist or LQA expert can translate or edit text, the reverse is rarely true: regular translators often lack the skills or knowledge necessary to develop or translate terminology or provide objective, unbiased reviews based on a quality metric.

Logrus IT has carefully built an entire network of specialized, highly trained and experienced resources possessing real-life experience of developing and maintaining terminology or doing LQAs for a number of our top clients. We currently provide these services for almost all world languages.

• We combine multiple teams and individuals for each language

Stable, scalable, efficient production requires every company to have a healthy mix of suppliers for each language. Some bigger, long-term projects with higher volumes are better served by regional language teams with local management quickly taking care of emergencies and centralized ground-level quality control. Other, more in-depth tasks like terminology management require specially trained, highly qualified individuals.

Logrus IT combines both types of resources. We are always ensuring sufficient production redundancy with at least two experienced and tested teams and multiple individuals, including dedicated terminologists and LQA people for each language.

• We use different translators for each area or content type

While translators try to cover as many subject areas as possible, no one is fully universal. Rather than taking unnecessary risks or taking these translators out of their comfort zone, we categorize language resources by area and use the most knowledgeable and qualified ones for each product line:

• Server products, mobile or ERP specialists
• Software and firmware specialists
• Marketing or finance specialists
• Dedicated terminology and LQA experts for each language
• Electrical and mechanical engineering experts
• Banking, investment and finance experts