The Center of Expertise is a special place in our company where any employee can rush saying, “I need this done but I don’t know how, please help me out!” Or, “The file is broken, all data is lost!” Or something along these lines. And if coming in person is not an option for whatever reason, we pretty much welcome any other form of communication. It goes for our full-time employees and freelancers alike – and our beloved customers too, of course. If there is anything translation-related troubling you right now, just send us an email at experts@neotech.ru. We will gladly help you.
All that said, the Center is way more than merely an internal support service. It is actively involved in developing many key areas of the company’s business. You can read about some of them by clicking on the sections below. Being equally important and dear to us, they come in alphabetical order.
The company’s activity is built around i-Pie, an in-house project management system. Just like the QMS (we’ll get to it a little further), it is constantly developed, with new functions added based on the employees’ suggestions and ideas. The system is maintained by the Center’s programmers.
Though technically not a production unit, the Center of Expertise includes a group of editors providing support to other departments. Our editors add finishing touches to the most demanding documents, perform quality checks, and take part in handling orders that require special attention. They also prepare and grade test tasks completed by candidates for various linguistic positions (translators, editors, proofreaders), prepare style guides and glossaries, and train newly-recruited linguists.
The backbone of our company, the QMS is essentially a vast scope of documents regulating all areas of Neotech’s activity. Since we are always moving forward, the QMS is also constantly updated. Some guidelines become outdated, and some need to be expanded. While all of the company’s departments take part in updating the QMS, the Center of Expertise is where this work is coordinated. The Center also organizes and holds internal audits to see how well the employees know the QMS and the company’s business processes.
Our company works with all file formats, including those that cannot be directly uploaded to CAT tools or processed with other software as is. It means that there is a constant need for all kinds of plugins, utilities, macros, add-ins and connectors to optimize text processing, simplify the conversion from one file format to another, and ensure cost effectiveness. While some of them may be quite simple, others are complicated software systems.
This includes a great number of important areas, from improving efficiency when working with CAT tools to researching machine translation. The Center’s experts help develop strategies to handle complicated orders, adjust in-depth settings of specialized software, recommend the right set of tools for a particular task and when and how to use them. If a customer’s request calls for new solutions, the Center’s technologists and developers are quick to tend to it. We also monitor the latest news of the translation industry and beyond, study promising new approaches and best practices, and help implement them across the company.
The Center’s instructors train employees to work with different software, hold workshops on modern technologies and approaches to translation, and help new employees adapt to Neotech’s business processes (including freelancers: check out our How to Enter the Profession page!). The e-learning group regularly adds to the list of online courses helping employees cover a lot of various topics in self-study mode, with an instructor monitoring their progress.
