Job Title: Translation Services Specialist III Company: L.A. Care Health Plan Location: Los Angeles, CA (on-site) Schedule: Full-time Pay:$77,265 – $123,625 per year
Role Overview:
Manage the entire lifecycle of translation and alternative format services.
Coordinate with internal teams and external vendors to ensure quality, timeliness, and compliance.
Monitor translation vendor performance and adherence to regulatory requirements (DHCS, DMHC, CMS).
Implement workflow improvements, act as a subject matter expert, and mentor junior staff.
Language Requirements:
Bilingual fluency in one of L.A. Care Health Plan’s threshold languages is highly desirable.
English
Spanish
Chinese
Armenian
Arabic
Farsi
Khmer
Korean
Russian
Tagalog
Vietnamese
Additional Knowledge/Skills:
Knowledge of translation industry trends and technologies: workflow/content management systems, translation memory, machine/AI translation.
Familiarity with managed care language assistance regulations.
Strong communication and project management skills.
Benefits:
Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance
Retirement plan with employer contributions
Paid time off and holidays
Professional growth opportunities in California’s largest public health plan
This role offers competitive pay, a strong benefits package, and the opportunity to support language access for millions of members across Los Angeles County. But it requires advanced regulatory knowledge and strong bilingual fluency in one of L.A. Care’s threshold languages.
I’d take it if they’ll let you standardize the pipeline end to end. When I rolled out a single intake form plus a simple vendor scorecard (turnaround time, rework rate, LQA errors) at a health plan, average turnaround dropped from 5 to 3 days and escalation emails basically stopped.
+1 to @kevin21 — if you can own intake, do it; when I ran a similar healthcare translation shop, a single JIRA form with required fields (audience, reg cite, alt format) cut rework about 30% and killed the Friday fire drills. Pair that with a locked glossary + 6th–8th grade readability gate and a monthly 10% LQA sample, and vendors suddenly meet SLAs. It’s kinda herding cats with HIPAA, but it works.
Biggest saver for me in a similar healthcare role: lock down PHI handoff to vendors — SFTP only, auto‑redact member data in source files, and forbid email attachments (ugh, learned the hard way). It keeps Compliance calm and speeds alternative format turnarounds since braille/large print shops don’t need full PHI. Since this is on-site in LA, I’d set a 1‑page PHI checklist with Compliance you can point to — do you have one yet?
I’d bake in a ‘freeze window’ before layout — 24–48 hours where any source tweak needs director sign‑off — which killed most of our weekend fire drills and stopped scope creep cold. Small caveat: it only sticks if the rule lives in your intake template and status workflow (agree with @lucy60), otherwise the last‑minute rewrite will come back like a bad sequel.
We cut rework by forcing every request through a JIRA intake with mandatory fields (audience, reading level, glossary/“do-not-translate”) and rejecting screenshots — , they still sneak in. For an on-site, full-time role owning ‘timeliness’ at L.A. Care, I’d also pseudo-translate and run length/placeholder checks before layout to catch overflows early; building on @mark85, tie that to a vendor scorecard. If JIRA’s overkill, a simple form plus a shared tracker gets you 80% of the control.
Since it’s on-site, set a weekly 15‑minute huddle with Compliance to pre-approve boilerplate; it shaved 2–3 days off our Medicare letters and killed a lot of re-translation churn. Also +1 to @lucy60’s intake — publish a simple SLA matrix (500 words same-day, 2k in 48h, 10k in 5 days) so “rush” asks don’t blow up the schedule.