The core of our company - founded back in 1986 - is a team of three translators specialized in translations from German and English to Spanish, and from Spanish to German. We cover these language combinations mainly in-house. For other language combinations that are demanded by our customers we outsource to external freelancers.

From the beginning with have put a stress on long term partnerships, because it is our conviction that this in the only way to produce excellent translations. We complete approx. 500 projects per year, and occasionally have to manage 5 to 10 projects concurrently.

In many of them we have to deal with one or more contact persons on the customer's end, and several translators and editors on our end. It is important to control the progress and the costs involved continuously, because the deadlines are getting tighter all the time and the profit margins have become dramatically narrower in these last years - due to the competition from outsiders.

On our way finding the right tool

We had been looking for a tool that would integrate the project and cost controlling for very long, one that would be powerful, flexible and most of all cost-effective. Big software applications were out of the question for us, because our company wouldn't use them to capacity and -quite frankly- couldn't afford them.

So we decided to write our own basic application, based on MS Access. With an intermediate knowledge of MS Access and its scripting language we were able to develop software that included customer management and project management. It was quite simple, with a few security issues and poor data constraining mechanisms, lacking user management etc.

Doing an Internet search I stumbled upon ]po[. This is what exactly what I had been looking for, plus the fact of it being open source allowed for a great deal of customization.

The first impression was good, but it was more the many possibilities it opened we were excited about. Besides, the interface was cleanly designed, which is what generally shifts one's decision in favor or against certain software on a first glance.

How we got started with ]po[

Once we had discovered the product, read the available documentation and made a first test install we already had made our decision. We know there is other software available (both open source and commercial), but this was the only one with modules tailored for a language services company.

The installation process is very straightforward. The Windows-Installer made this task very straightforward. We did run a test phase of approx. one month, in order to get used to its dependencies and operation. It is a multi-phase procedure: you have to define users, assign them rights, define companies, assign users to companies and so on.

The ]po[-team has written a set of comprehensive operation and administration guides. Most of the information you need is contained in them. The guides might sometimes not be up-to-date, because the software is continuously being refined. So what you get from a CVS-snapshot might not be fully explained in the guides, but this is quite usual.

For smaller amounts of data not normalized for the ]po[-database we think it is advisable to enter them into the system by hand. There are many constraints and interdepencies, so writing a script for transferring the data from your present database to the system's one can be quite cumbersome. The process has clearly outlined stages. It is important to plan this carefully, because missing data can easily result in a system that doesn't provide the data necessary to process.

Moving ahead

After using a system for a while, we wanted to move a little bit out from the "translation agency" environment and implement some features that would make the system even more useful for our specific needs. Most of them, like task managing, cost calculation, invoicing, are already available. One needs to take the time to read the documentation available in order to learn to implement and use them. ]po[ has a message board available in sourceforge.net for these general setup and usage questions.

Resume

Usually highly specialized business applications are usually commercial apps. You wouldn't expect an ERP to be Open Source in the first place, because the user targets are companies. Moreover it is very difficult to create a big developer community involved in the project, therefore the I+D effort and costs are much higher than in popular open source applications.

Thus it is very understandable that the PO-developers charge for certain very specialized modules and for consulting services. We have to say that we are delighted. The system is easy to install, robust, has a very efficient support and you experience the benefits from the moment on you start to use it.

We translators are not notorious for being techies, and there are not so many non-linguistic software tools specifically tailored for our field, so ]po[ is very well received. Of course, hiring the consultancy services offered by ]po[ would have made things much easier to accomplish.

]po[ is basically open source, and their developers earn their money with the consultancy services. Larger companies, for which a flawless implementation is mission-critical can benefit a lot from their know-how.

About Leinhäuser und Partner Fachübersetzungen

Leinhäuser und Partner Fachübersetzungen is a renowned translation firm based in Munich. The company has 9 in-house employees, turnover of EUR 1.2 mil, and specializes in translation services in the IT, telecommunications, automotive, toy and banking sectors. Leinhäuser und Partner provides its customers, which range from SMEs to large-scale industry operators, with high-quality translation services.

Contact: Euro Transmit

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