Changing Translation Supplier: What to Check Before You Switch, and How to Keep Your Translation Memory
Before changing translation supplier, check what your contract says about ownership, then ask the current supplier for your translation memories in TMX and your glossaries in TBX before you announce the change. Open the files to confirm they are complete, consolidate memories held by different suppliers, and run a pilot before live work moves. At DEMA Solutions, memories and glossaries always belong to the client.
Who this guide is for
This guide is for the people who carry the switch from decision to daily work: technical documentation and localization managers, technical writers, and the procurement, operations and quality directors who sign the contract, at manufacturers of machinery, HVAC systems, lifting and handling equipment, packaging and process lines, automation or rail. It is also for Italian companies inside international groups, where the parent company wants one set of terms everywhere and the subsidiaries notice every inconsistency.
If you are still deciding who to work with, our guide on how to choose a technical translation company covers the questions to ask. This article starts where that one ends. You have decided to switch translation provider, or you are close to it, and you want to do it without losing approved translations, delaying a release or confusing the people who review your manuals in other countries.
Why manufacturers change translation supplier, and why they wait too long
The reasons are rarely dramatic. A supplier that worked well for a few brochures starts to struggle when the volume becomes operating manuals, spare parts catalogues and interface strings for a growing product range. Terminology drifts between releases, a unit is converted that should not have been, a subsidiary complains for the third time about the same term, or the handback files need hours of repair before they can be published. Sometimes the trigger is structural: an acquisition brings a second supplier into the group, a new market needs languages the current supplier does not cover well, or the Machinery Regulation (EU) 2023/1230, which applies from 20 January 2027, means many manuals will be revised and translated in the same few months.
Most companies still wait longer than they should. The current supplier knows the products, the files are somewhere in its systems, and nobody is sure what would be lost in a change. That uncertainty is reasonable, but it is also a sign that control of your own linguistic assets has drifted to someone else. A well planned switch is mostly a matter of order: secure what you own first, test the new supplier on real content, and move work in stages. For companies that have always translated internally, the same decision is weighed up in our guide to in-house versus outsourced translation.
What is really at stake when you switch
Three things carry over from one supplier to the next if the switch is handled well, and each of them is lost if it is not.
The first is the translation memory: every sentence your company has paid to translate and approve, stored with its translation. It is the reason updates of a manual cost less than the first edition and the reason a safety warning reads the same in every document. Without it, the new supplier starts from zero, your costs rise for months and consistency resets.
The second is terminology: the glossary of approved component names, process terms and forbidden alternatives, together with the many small decisions that never made it into a glossary but live in the heads of the linguists who worked on your account.
The third is continuity of work in progress: jobs half finished, updates promised for next month, a catalogue waiting for layout. A switch that ignores the calendar creates a gap exactly when a release is due.
Who owns the memory, and what a good agreement says about it, is the subject of our article on who owns your translation memory. Here we focus on how to get it back and put it to work with a new supplier.
The checklist before changing translation supplier
The steps below are in the order that protects you best. None of them needs a large project, and most can run alongside normal translation work.
Read the contract before you say anything
Start with the paperwork: the framework agreement, the general terms attached to the offers, any purchase order conditions and the data processing agreement. Look for four things. What the contract says about the ownership of translation memories, glossaries and translated content. Whether there is a notice period, a minimum volume or an exclusivity clause. Whether exports are mentioned at all, and at what cost. And what the supplier must do with your data and files when the relationship ends.
Many contracts say nothing about memories, which is not the same as saying they belong to the supplier. If the wording is unclear or the stakes are high, ask your legal team to read it before you request anything. Knowing your position makes the next conversation short and factual.
Ask for your translation memories and glossaries first
Request the exports before you announce the change, while the relationship is still routine. Ask for one TMX file per language pair, or one multilingual file, covering all your content and nothing else, and for the glossary in TBX or a structured spreadsheet with definitions and forbidden terms. Ask for any style guide, query log or list of terms that should not be translated, too. Put the request in writing and keep it simple: you are asking for your own data in standard formats.
Most suppliers cooperate when the request is clear. Asking early also tells you something useful about the supplier you are leaving: an export that arrives quickly and complete is a good sign that the handover will be smooth.
Check what you received
A TMX file can be valid and still incomplete. Open it in a second environment, or ask the new supplier to analyse it, and check that the language pairs are right, that the segment count is plausible for the years of work it represents, that formatting tags from your FrameMaker, InDesign or XML files have survived, and that there is no content from other clients mixed in. Compare the glossary with the terms your engineers actually use. If something is missing, ask again now, while the supplier is still working for you.
Collect everything else that makes your translations work
The memory and glossary are the core of the handover, but other material saves weeks of rediscovery. A complete package usually includes:
- Translation memories in TMX and glossaries in TBX or a structured spreadsheet, per language
- The style guide and any client instructions, such as forms of address, unit conventions and warning formats
- Query logs, so decisions already taken are not asked again
- Reference material: the latest approved translated manuals, catalogues and interface strings
- Layout assets: templates, fonts licensed to you and any prepared source files
- A list of open jobs, with their status and expected delivery
Plan around the release calendar
List every job in progress and every release planned in the next few months. Let the outgoing supplier finish what it has started, so no document is split between two suppliers mid way, and choose a quiet product line or a single language group for the first jobs with the new one. If a large revision is coming, for example manuals being reworked before the Machinery Regulation applies, decide whether it is better done before the switch or after it, rather than in the middle. Our article on the Machinery Regulation and translated documentation explains what changes for instructions and why many manufacturers are planning revision peaks.
When your memories are scattered across several suppliers
Many manufacturers discover during a switch that there is no single memory to hand over. There is one at the current supplier, one at a supplier used five years ago, one inside a German or Spanish subsidiary, one inherited with an acquired company, and a folder of translated manuals in PDF and Word that never went into any memory at all.
Moving all of that to a new supplier unchanged moves the problem with it. The same sentence will be offered in three different translations, old terms will come back through matches, and leverage will stay low because the new supplier cannot tell which version is approved. A switch is the best moment to fix it, because every source has to be collected anyway.
Consolidation means merging the memories into one master per language pair, removing duplicates and resolving conflicting translations against an approved glossary rather than simply keeping the most recent one. Translations that exist only as documents can be paired with their source files to create new memory content, which is the job of translation memory alignment. When several suppliers and subsidiaries are involved, the governance questions, such as who approves terms and which supplier works on which content, are covered in our article on managing translation across multiple vendors and markets.
Keeping terminology stable during the switch
Readers of your manuals should not be able to tell that you changed translation vendor. The risk is greatest in the first months, when new linguists meet your product names for the first time and the old supplier’s unwritten choices are no longer there to guide them.
The answer is to make those choices explicit before the first job. Review the glossary with the people who know the product, and add the terms that cause trouble: components with similar names, process steps your company describes in its own way, and terms your subsidiaries have corrected in the past. Mark forbidden and obsolete terms, not just preferred ones. Where you have no glossary at all, the consolidated memory is a good source for building one, because it shows how each term has actually been translated. The method is explained in our article on keeping technical terminology consistent across translators and suppliers.
A short style guide does the same for decisions that are not about single words: formal or informal address, how warnings are phrased, whether units are ever converted, how product names are written. It takes an afternoon to write and saves the same question being asked on every project. Our piece on why a translation style guide builds consistent content shows what to include.
Onboarding the new supplier and the risk of the first job
Onboarding is where a new supplier turns your assets into a working setup: importing the memories, loading the glossary, reading the style guide, preparing your file types and assigning linguists to your product families. How long it takes depends on what you hand over. A clean memory, an approved glossary and real reference files make it fast; scattered memories, no glossary and scanned PDFs make it slower, because that work has to be done first.
The first job is the riskiest one in any switch. The memory has not yet been tested on your new content, the linguists are reading your documentation for the first time and the file preparation has not yet been proven on your formats. Three choices reduce that risk. Pick a first job that is real but not critical, such as an update rather than a launch manual. Ask the new supplier to show you the analysis of that job against your memory before it starts, so you can see that your existing translations are being reused. And plan time for your own reviewer to check the result before it is published.
File handling deserves its own attention. If your source files need preparation before translation, or older documents exist only as PDF, the new supplier should say so at the start, not when the first delivery is due. How that preparation works is described in our article on DTP file preparation for translation.
Ask, too, how requests will reach the new supplier. The people who send files should not have to learn a new system on the first day. A good supplier accepts requests the way your team already works, usually by email, and offers anything new, such as a client portal, as an option you can test before relying on it.
Run a pilot before live work moves
A pilot answers the questions a meeting cannot. Choose a sample of one or two thousand words from a current document, in a language you can check internally, in its original file format. Include the content that usually goes wrong: a safety warning, a table of technical data with units and tolerances, cross references, terms your company uses in its own way, and some text that already exists in your memory.
Send the memory and glossary with the sample and judge the result on four levels: whether the file opens and publishes without repair, whether terminology and numbers match the source and the glossary, whether the supplier asked sensible questions and reported what came from the memory, and how much of your own time the pilot took. Agree in advance whether the pilot is paid, and that the translation and any memory created belong to you either way.
Tell subsidiaries, distributors and reviewers
The people who review your translations in other countries are part of the switch, even if they are not part of the contract. A subsidiary in Germany or a distributor in Spain that has spent years correcting the old supplier’s work will judge the new one quickly, and a terminology change they were not told about will look like a mistake.
Tell them before the first delivery: who the new supplier is, which languages and products move when, and how they send corrections. Give each language one named reviewer, and agree that approved corrections go into the glossary and memory rather than staying in an email. Reviewers who see their corrections applied in the next document stay engaged; those who see the same error twice stop sending feedback.
Checking the new supplier's quality in the first months
A pilot shows how a supplier works on one sample; the first months show how it works under normal pressure. Agree in advance how quality will be measured, so the discussion is about facts rather than impressions. Useful measures are simple: errors found by your reviewers, classified by severity, with terminology, numbers and meaning counted separately from style; files returned on time and usable without repair; and leverage on each job compared with what the memory should deliver.
Ask how the supplier’s own process checks quality: whether every translation is revised by a second qualified linguist, which automated checks run on numbers, tags and terminology, and how complaints feed back into the glossary and memory. The full set of questions is in our guide on how to assess a translation supplier’s quality. Review the results together after the first few jobs, and again after a few months, while there is still time to adjust.
Three objections, answered
“Switching is too risky with a release coming.” It is risky when everything moves at once. Secured exports, a pilot on non critical content and a staged move by product line or language group keep the risk small, and the outgoing supplier finishes the jobs already started. Staying with a supplier that no longer fits is a risk too; it is simply less visible.
“The old supplier will not release our files.” In practice, most suppliers hand over memories when asked clearly and early, in writing, for standard formats. If the contract is silent, ownership is a question for your legal team, not a reason to give up. And where a memory really cannot be recovered, the approved translated documents you already hold can be aligned with their sources to rebuild much of it.
“Onboarding will take months.” Onboarding time depends on the state of your assets, not on the supplier’s goodwill. Clean exports, an approved glossary and real reference files shorten it; scattered memories make it longer because consolidation has to come first. That consolidation work is worth doing anyway, and it only has to be done once.
How DEMA Solutions handles a supplier switch
When a manufacturer moves its technical translation services to us, we start from the memories and glossaries you already have rather than replacing them. We analyse what you receive from your previous supplier, tell you honestly what state it is in, and, where memories are spread across several suppliers or exist only as translated documents, consolidate and align them into one master per language pair.
From the first project, your translation memory and glossary belong to you and are delivered in TMX and TBX whenever you ask, including if you ever decide to leave us. Our process is ISO 17100 certified, with a second qualified linguist revising every translation, as described on our quality page. Leverage is reported transparently on every job, so you can see from the first quote that you are not paying again for content you already approved. Our teams in Italy, Serbia and Spain work on the same memories and glossaries, so consistency does not depend on who handles a given language.
On the practical side, you get one commercial contact, your sales manager, working with a dedicated project manager who learns your files and products. Requests can keep coming by email, as they did with your previous supplier, or through a dedicated SharePoint space or our client portal, where you can flag urgent jobs and follow the status and timelines of every translation. If you want to try the portal before changing anything, you can send one or more test requests without commissioning a translation and talk the experience through with us, and we offer training by video call or in person.
Where TUBE fits
For manufacturers who translate documentation continuously, TUBE is our solution for keeping that control after the switch. Your glossary and translation memory control machine translation, every approved translation goes into a memory you own and can export, and leverage reporting shows how much of each update comes from reuse.
Frequently asked questions
Check what the contract says about ownership of translation memories and glossaries, notice periods and exports. Request your memories in TMX and glossaries in TBX before announcing the change, open them to confirm they are complete, list jobs in progress, and run a pilot with the new supplier on real content before moving live work.
Ask the current supplier for a TMX export of all your content, per language pair, together with the glossary, and check the files in a second environment. Give them to the new supplier before the first job, and ask for an analysis that shows how much of the new content the memory already covers.
It depends on what the contract says. A memory is built from your own source content, so many companies treat it as theirs, but if the agreement is silent the position is less clear. Check the wording, involve your legal team if needed, and in future agreements state ownership and export terms explicitly.
Make a clear written request for your data in standard formats and check your contractual position. If the memory still cannot be recovered, the approved translated documents you hold can be aligned with their source files to rebuild a large part of it.
Collect TMX exports from every source, approve a master glossary, then merge them into one memory per language pair, removing duplicates and resolving conflicting translations against the glossary. Documents that were never stored in a memory can be aligned with their sources.
Yes. A small pilot on a real document, in its original format and in a language you can check, shows how the supplier handles your terminology, numbers, files and memory before any release depends on it.
Yes. Tell them which languages and products move when, give each language a named reviewer, and agree how corrections reach the glossary and memory. Reviewers who are informed early judge the new supplier on facts rather than surprises.
Plan your switch with us
If you are thinking of changing translation supplier, or you want to know what your current memories and glossaries are worth before you decide, tell us what you translate and who holds your files today. We will review your assets and propose a switch plan that fits your release calendar.
How can we help?
Tell us what you need and we’ll get back to you with the solutions.