Case Study: Government of Greenland achieves faster, consistent bilingual translations and a 75% reduction in freelance translation costs with RWS (SDL TMS)

SDL TMS helps the Greenlandic Government to cross the language divide

The Government of Greenland faced a unique language challenge: a bilingual administration where many senior officials speak Danish while most citizens speak Greenlandic, which itself has four distinct regional dialects. A central team of 11 translators supporting 10 departments had to manually translate vast volumes of internal documents—budgets, legislation, reports and memos—leading to slow, inconsistent workflows and heavy reliance on external freelancers.

By adopting SDL TMS as a SaaS solution with a centralized translation memory, clear workflows and local dialect memories, the government streamlined collaboration, reuse and terminology management. Productivity per translator rose from about 4 pages/day to 6–10 pages/day, the team handled over 5 million words in 2015, freelance costs fell by 75% since 2015, and large jobs (e.g., a 1,000-page budget) dropped from three people taking three months to two people in three weeks; the system is now used across municipalities and by a government company, improving consistency and supporting the growth of Greenlandic terminology.

Government of Greenland

Kim Christiansen

Project Manager