"Today, our distributors (or clients) in the various countries translate our materials for us. Why should we use Qarto?"

Qarto offers you a number of key advantages:
Better Quality: Your distributor is not a professional translator. Consequently the resulting text will most likely "feel" like it has been translated from another language. Distributors usually give the localization task to in-house personnel who have no real translation experience. In addition, the process will usually not feature any third-party proofreading, correction or linguistic editing.
However, the worst part of using non-professional translators is that of consistency. Our professional translators "transcreate" source content to ensure that the resulting text best resonates with its market. Qarto tools such as the Automated Translation Memory and Glossary / Phraseology / Terminology thesaurus ensure that every document or artwork file uses approved words and phrases helping reinforce brand messaging and language.
Faster Production: Having your distributor translate for you often results in delays and missed deadlines. Translating content is not your distributor's "day job" - their main attention will, inevitably, lie elsewhere.
Better QC: Better Quality Control means a better end-result. Separate proofreading and/or correction workflow stages ensure errors are caught early and that the best, most appropriate content is used for your target market. After receiving a complete and polished translation from Qarto, you can always forward it to your distributor for comment and fine-tuning, if necessary.
Project Management: Qarto centralizes project management and all technical processes, allowing you free-up personnel to do what they do best - saving time and money. Qarto's comprehensive reporting and audit trail gives complete project transparency and a detailed history of every element of the project's development - something simply not possible using manual methods. Naturally, reports can be exported for integration into third-party systems (e.g. MIS)
Consistency: Using Qarto ensures that all of your documentation, printed materials, online information and new-media content looks the same and gives out the same message - regardless of language, format, or delivery method.

"Is Qarto a translation service?"

Translating content is just one part of how we help you better manage all of your company's translation requirements. Qarto is an application that allows you to manage, translate, collaborate, and approve the entire process of localizing content, faster and cheaper than ever before. Yes, it will allow you to translate documents and artwork files. But the real power of Qarto lies in its ability to give you control in how you describe your company / product / service in other languages, across a wide range of document and artwork file formats.

"I'm happy with my existing translators / translation agency. Why do I need Qarto?"

Using Qarto you can continue to use your existing translation suppliers, but reduce your costs in using them! Qarto's next-generation Translation Memory Automation, automated page-building engine, third-party systems integration and automated project management tools reduce production time and translation costs, requiring less resources.
Qarto is a modular and extensible system, allowing you to take advantage of as many - or as few - features as you require.
Adding your own list of translators to the system as supplier resources allows you to track and automate many laborious tasks, saving time and reducing the risk of error. Should your translation requirements change or grow over time, our database of more than 3,000 certified translators can save you time searching for a particular language competency.
The system keeps track of every project, document and page production status in real-time allowing anyone given access to know exactly what's been completed, what's still to be approved, and what's currently in correction. Plus, Qarto can be accessed from anywhere where there's an internet connection – even from smartphones such as the iPhone, Android or Blackberry.

"How do I know if Qarto translators are good enough for my project?"

You get to try them out - for free!
Once you have shortlisted potentially-suitable translators for the project, Qarto can automatically send them a short excerpt of your source text. You can then award the translation job to whichever translator provides the best localized text.
When translating an actual job, should you not be happy with the proposed final result for whatever reason you simply place the project into a "correction" stage. Here, the translator will amend / modify the text according to your instructions. Projects can be placed into correction as many times as necessary, at no charge. You only pay for the translation once you approve it.

"How does Qarto save my company money?"

By centralizing all of your content localization needs with Qarto, everyone in your organization knows where to find out what the production status of any document that needs to be translated. No more wasted time with telephone calls or emails. Qarto reduces the time it takes to produce localized text, allows an online, collaborative way of working, and reduces the chance of human errors.
Today, translating brochures, catalogs, advertising, etc. requires two separate processes. First the text (in the form of a .doc or .txt file) is translated. Then, once approved, a designer needs to create a new artwork file in a professional desktop publishing application. Qarto merges these two processes into a single workflow. As well as Microsoft Office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) documents, Qarto also supports the direct ingestion of Adobe InDesign, Illustrator and QuarkXPress files. For file output, Qarto offers all the above formats as well as PDF, ePub, and a raft of specialized formats for digital flip-books, iOS / Android / Windows 7 mobile apps, and eBook applications.
Using Qarto you are never unsure as to whether the translated document that you are sending to get printed is the most recent, approved version. Using Qarto's "Translation Memory Automation" any unique text (industry terminology, your organization's brand language, jargon, etc.) only ever has to be translated once. From then on, each time Qarto finds the same term in future documents it automatically applies the translation – with the option to modify it if necessary – meaning that the translator doesn't have to translate that word or phrase. Since translators charge per word, this saving can swiftly mount up to thousands over the course of a year. Unlike other Translation Memory tools, Qarto allows separate yet linked Translation Memory dictionaries. This allows you to specify different translations for words / phrases for different product lines, for example.
Qarto can be integrated with a number of third-party Brand Management, Customer Relationship Management or Digital Asset Management systems. Qarto then becomes the 'engine' that manages your localized content, adding a level of production automation that leads to faster production turnarounds, reduced costs, increased production transparency and virtually limitless throughput.
Qarto is a modular and extensible system, allowing you to take advantage of as many - or as few - features as you require.

"How secure is my data?"

We take security and systems availability very seriously and have developed a number of security features within Qarto. Some of the security highlights include:
  • Identity and Access Management: Ensures that only properly-authenticated users are permitted access.
  • Encryption: Used internally within Qarto for protecting control channels, as well as for all client-server communications.
  • Customer Access: The internal Qarto systems managing access to customer environments are isolated from the production data server, separating customer access infrastructure from customer applications and storage.
https
https (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) provides a secure identification of the web server, as well as providing encrypted communication between server and client, and is commonly used by banking websites, Amazon, eBay, etc. The encrypted link ensures that all data (files and project data) exchanged between the web server and the client remain private and integral. Standard Qarto server encryption is 128-bit, though we can offer higher bit encryption as options.
SSL
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates are one of the most widely-used and universally-accepted cryptographic security protocols to be found on the internet. All communications between Qarto internal components are protected with SSL. Qarto implements SSL 3.0 protocols as a standard feature, and we offer the more advanced TLS (Transport Security Layer) protocol as an option. 
Availability
The Qarto SaaS model is based around co-located twin "hot-failover" server locations, one based in Europe and the other based in the North America. Data between the twin servers is mirrored and backed-up every five seconds. Data between the two locations is mirrored automatically and backed-up every 36 hours. We can offer a more frequent back-up regime if required. In the unlikely event of both servers from one location going offline at the same time, the co-located server subsystem would automatically take over duties. This process is handled automatically and is transparent to the end-user. 
If you have any particular security protocols or applications that you would like us to implement as an additional security layer, we would be more than happy to discuss roll-out as part of the system deployment phase.