Today, Zingword announced the launch of its latest translation tool: ZingChat. Designed as a team chat program specifically geared for translators, ZingChat is engineered to fit in with the Zingword product ecosystem and provide language workers a seamless communication experience. Robert Rogge, CEO of Zingword, took the time to answer a few questions about the work that went into the new tool.
When and how did you and your team decide that the translation industry needed its own team chat program?
As a marketplace and vendor management product for translations, chat was always going to be a core part of the Zingword experience.
Talking to different LSPs and people in the industry, we realized that the communication methods on offer were all over the place.
In what ways are existing and more generalized team chat platforms not ideally suited for translator teams?
There are different reasons for different chat platforms. Traditional “business chat” players are cost and user prohibitive; they are not designed to accommodate hundreds or thousands of freelance collaborators you may or may not communicate with regularly. It’s also a burden on translators to chat in several different systems or create multiple accounts, whereas with ZingChat translators get the added value of their Zingword account and can communicate with multiple clients in one place.
But the main reason is those products are not extendable. ZingChat is fully-extendable and integratable with existing processes, meaning that we will be adding features directly in the chat to support various business processes that clients may have.
What features are you proudest of in ZingChat?
ZingChat is one of the first industry-specific, fully-featured team chat products in the world, in any industry.
How does ZingChat integrate into your other tools? How difficult was that to accomplish?
ZingChat currently integrates with Zingword’s marketplace, making it easy to reach out to perfect candidates and quickly proceed through onboarding to project. It integrates with our sidebar system which lets you build group discussions or projects while you navigate translator profiles without losing track of your work. Further integrations are on our roadmap.
It is and was difficult to accomplish, and there are yet many things to be done!
With this big new product release, what is planned for the future?
Well, the next releases are smaller in scope but still very ambitious. They are mostly dedicated to talent management, so now you can recruit linguists, you can communicate with linguists. The idea is to get better at the sausage-making of vendor management.
Anything else you want to comment on?
Our beta testing and early reports are in and they are very positive. What I would add is how flexible chat can be. For some types of business, you can just as well use chat to send/receive files, deliveries, invoices, and discuss issues. Chat means totally different things for vendor managers, localization managers, quality managers.
Otherwise, I think centralization is key. What’s cool about ZingChat is you have many clients using the same platform where all the translators are on that platform, and this system just plugs into whatever other systems you are using.
