Smartling

Sample RFP
Contents

3 Company Profile
4 Language Services
6 Product Overview
7 Translation Management System
(TMS)
11 API, Connectors, Integrations
13 Web Proxy
15 Customer Service & Support
16 Security
17 Costs

Smartling Sample RFP 2

Company Profile

Company Profile
1. Please provide a company history and overview.

2. Who is your leadership team?

3. Is your company private or public?

4. Describe your company’s financial standing.

5. Who are your investors?

6. Please list your company’s office locations.

7. How many years have you been in business?

8. How many employees do you have?

9. Has your company won any significant awards?

10. Which industries do you serve?

11. How many customers do you have, and who are they?

12 What is your customer retention rate?

13. What differentiates your company from your competitors?

Smartling Sample RFP 3

Language Services

Language Services
1. What types of language services do you provide?

2. Describe your translation process.

3. Describe your transcreation process.

4. What languages do you support?

5. What turnaround times do you support?

6. Who are your translators and where are they located?

7. Describe how you test linguists for translation skills

and subject matter expertise.

8. How does your company define and measure

linguistic quality?

9. How do you audit the performance of your translators?

10. What service level guarantees do you provide?

11. Do you provide visual context for the translators?

How, specifically, do you do this?

12. Do you designate specific translators for a customer?

Smartling Sample RFP 4

Language Services

13. Do you provide full visibility into who (by name) is

performing the translations?

14. Can a customer communicate directly with the translators?

How does this work?

15. How do you guarantee that a translator and editor are not
the same person in a given workflow?

16. What differentiates your language services from other

companies?

Smartling Sample RFP 5

Product Overview

Product Overview
1. What are the benefits and differentiators of your product?

2. Do you offer a SaaS solution, an on-premise solution, or both?

3. What is your development process?

4. How large is your development team?

5. Please provide information about your release cycles, i.e. how

often do you release new versions?

6. What are your solution’s integration options?

7. Does your solution provide APIs?

8. What is your historical system availability and uptime?

9. How scalable is your solution?

10. Please share information about your roadmap.

11. How do you manage your roadmap, and what input into your
roadmap do customers have?

12. Please describe how you continuously improve your solution

and processes.

13. Please provide examples of the business value your solution

offers to your customers.

Smartling Sample RFP 6

Translation Management
System (TMS)

Translation
Management System
(TMS)

1. Please describe your Translation Management System.

2. What languages does your system support?

3. What file formats does your system support?

4. Do you offer a document portal for translation orders?

5. What types of status/progress information does your

system provide?

6 Describe your translation memory capabilities.

7. Does your translation memory support penalties and

sequencing?

8. Can you create virtual translation memories by combining

existing translation memories?

9. Can you edit, modify, and segment your translation

memories?

10. Can linguists access real-time changes to the translation

memory from other collaborators? How does this work?

Smartling Sample RFP 7

Translation Management
System (TMS)

11. Please describe your solution’s glossary and terminology

management capabilities.

12. Does your system automatically extract and suggest

glossary terms?

13. Can translation memories be imported and exported,

and if so, what are the import/export formats?

14. Can glossaries/term bases be imported and exported,

and if so, what are the import/export formats?

15. Describe your system’s workflow capabilities.

16. Can internal and external translators and reviewers be

incorporated into the process?

17. Can translation service providers manage their own users,

i.e. their own team of linguists? How does this work?

18. Which user roles are available?

19. Can roles be customized?

20. How many users can be connected simultaneously without

impacting performance?

21. How many users do you have for your typical customers?

22. Please describe the available user notifications and how

they are configured.

23. Please describe your multi-vendor capabilities.

24. Please describe your translator tools.

Smartling Sample RFP 8

Translation Management
System (TMS)

25. How do your tools support translation quality?

26. Can translators work offline, and if so, what is the format
for offline translations?

27. Does your system show translations in context?

28. How is context captured and displayed to translators?

29. What review capabilities does your system have?

30. Describe your issue management capabilities.

31. What are your reporting capabilities?

32. What are the typical—and maximum—volumes of words

processed through your system?

33. Does your solution provide information about the content

and translation history?

34. Does your translation management system include deadline

management?

35. Can instructions and reference materials be added to the

translatable content?

36. Does your solution offer machine translation integrations?

Please describe and include information about the machine
translation engines with which you integrate.

37. What is a typical translation workflow with machine

translation?

Smartling Sample RFP 9

Translation Management
System (TMS)

38. How much time is typically needed to deploy your

translation management system?

39. What are the steps to set up a new customer on

your translation management system?

Smartling Sample RFP 10

API, Connectors, Integrations

API, Connectors,
Integrations
1. Does your system offer developer APIs? What endpoints
are available?

2. Please provide API documentation.

3. Which content management systems do you integrate

with using a pre-built connector?

4. Which eCommerce platforms do you integrate with

using a pre-built connector?

5. Which marketing platforms do you support with a pre-built

connector?

6. Which CRM platforms do you support with a pre-built

connector?

7. Which support platforms do you support with a pre-built

connector?

8. Which source code repositories do you support with

a pre-built connector?

9. Do you integrate with TAUS DQF?

10. Do you integrate with Slack?

Smartling Sample RFP 11

API, Connectors, Integrations

11. Please describe your [insert name of content platform]

connector.

12. What are the implementation tasks for the [insert name
of content platform] connector?

13. How long does a platform connector implementation

typically take?

Smartling Sample RFP 12

Web Proxy

Web Proxy
1. Please provide a brief description of your proxy solution.

2. Does your solution work with content delivery networks

(CDNs)?

3. How do analytics work with your proxy solution?

4. What reporting and analytics does your solution provide

for individual proxied sites?

5. Can your solution deliver localized content?

6. How does your proxy solution allow for custom content

on specific multilingual sites?

7. Can your proxy solution handle date formats, currencies,

payment types, and other localizations?

8. Does your system work with javascript content?

9. Does your solution handle dynamic code? How does

this work?

10. What is your uptime guarantee for your proxy solution?

11. Can you share performance statistics regarding your

proxy solution? Please be specific.

12. Does your solution support frequent updates to the

source site?

Smartling Sample RFP 13

Web Proxy

13. Do you provide a way to customize code, server-side, for

specific multilingual sites delivered via your proxy solution?

14. What are your solution’s SEO capabilities?

15. How do you handle onsite search?

16. Does your proxy solution provide context for the translation
and review process? How does this work?

17. Can your proxy solution automatically bundle source content

into translation projects / jobs? How does this work?

18. What are some examples of customers who use your

proxy solution?

19. What are the implementation tasks?

20. How long does the implementation typically take?

Smartling Sample RFP 14

Customer Service and Support

Customer Service
and Support
1. How much training does your system require?

2. What are the training options, and how is the

training delivered?

3. Is your training role-based?

4. What documentation do you provide?

5. What support options do you offer?

6. What are your support SLAs?

7. Can you provide 24/7 support? How does this work?

8. What tools do you have for support (knowledge base,

support portal, etc.)?

9. Describe your customer support team, roles, and experience.

10. Do you have a Professional Services team?

11. What types of services does your Professional Services

team provide?

12. Do you schedule regular business reviews with

your customers?

13. How do you start a new customer relationship?

Smartling Sample RFP 15

Security

Security
1. Is your system PCI certified, including third-party audit? At
what level?

2. Is your system SOC-2 certified, including third-party audit?

3. Is your system HIPAA compliant, including third-party audit?

4. Are you GDPR compliant?

5. What are your security and data protection standards?

6. How do you ensure application security?

7. What are your authentication and authorization procedures?

8. How do you ensure data security?

9. What is your business continuity plan?

Smartling Sample RFP 16

Costs

Costs
1. Please describe your software pricing model.

2. Is there a per-seat cost?

3. Do you charge a setup or implementation fee?

4. Is training included in the setup or implementation fee?

5. Do translators pay for licenses or training?

6. Do you offer discounts?

7. What is the minimum contract period?

8. What other services do you charge for?

9. How do you price your translation / language services?

Smartling Sample RFP 17