Assign tasks to another company

Indeed, one of the most interesting Smartcat features is the means to assign a project or document to another company, which will allow working on a project as if it is their own. Arrangement of the client-vendor connection, use cases, and the features to take into account are going to be covered in this article.

There are two must-do conditions for forming a connection between corporate accounts in Smartcat:

Both accounts have to be on the same server.

At the moment, Smartcat has three servers, divided by region: USA (https://us.smartcat.com/), Europe (https://smartcat.com/), and Asia (https://ea.smartcat.com/).

You can check out the server by the URL in the address bar of your browser.

That said, if a client has an account on the European server, then you also need an account on the European server. The Smartcat support service will help you find out the solution and create an account on the client's server if your servers don't match. It's worth noting that your linguistic resources and team are unique for each server, so you will need to transfer them to a new account.

A client must add a vendor account to the vendor list.

In the Team section of any corporate account, there is the My Vendors tab where you can find a list of companies that have already been added as service suppliers as well as configure access rights for each.

Adding a vendor will take a couple of clicks if both accounts are on the same server.

By the way, clients that have added the vendor will be marked in the vendor's client list with the infinity sign.

The assigning process doesn't differ much from assigning a linguist, though some distinctions listed below should be considered.

• A vendor may set a service and rate to facilitate the assignment for several stages on the client end making it a one-click task.

In the example above, the vendor, TestAccount2, has the Translation and Editing service with the rate and language pair. That is, once the client confirms the assignment, TestAccount2 will be assigned straight to both stages of the project.

• A client can assign a vendor only to the whole document, so no document splitting is possible.

• A vendor's managers will not be able to edit segments until they assign at least one linguist to any stage. The segments will be locked.
  Managers can assign themselves if linguists have not confirmed the assignment yet in the case when some preliminary editing has to be done urgently.

• A client cannot cancel the assignment to a vendor as long as at least one linguist has been assigned on the vendor end.
  This means that the client needs to ask the vendor to remove all assignments first. It works this way  to avoid unexpected cancellations for the vendor's linguists all of a sudden  without understanding why the project is canceled— communication is everything. It is better to discuss the details of cancellation before it happens than not to do so.

• A vendor cannot assign a project or document to another vendor.
  The client-vendor connection is two-tier in the current implementation. Nevertheless, a client can assign multiple vendors to different documents or stages within a project.

The substantial difference between projects assigned by a client is the option for both companies to connect their translation memories to the project and write the translation in them. However, the client may limit writing in translation for the vendor in the project settings.

Another thing is that a client cannot see linguists that are working on the project from a vendor end. Authors of revisions are hidden too in the Editor.

The project page on the vendor side is different from if the vendor created the project independently. Here the vendor may specify such parameters as the project cost, deadline, and whether the cost has been agreed or whether the project has been paid. The vendor can also attach a quote or invoice, which is available for download to the client in the Project Team tab.

The project page on a vendor end.

The Team tab on a client end.

In all other aspects, working on assigned projects is similar to own projects where a company assigns only linguists.

The client-vendor connection not only makes communications between companies in Smartcat easy but also the process of transferring files(literally in one click), monitoring progress, and using linguistic resources. The vendor's linguists will not see that the project is assigned by another company. That is, the vendor will be the linguists' client, so their names and contacts will be available only to the vendor, which sound fair. To sum it up, the client-vendor connection is a win-win for both — the client and the vendor. You're welcome to try it out and start embedding this Smartcat feature in your translation workflow right now.