Or, the Advantages a Professional Translation Service
Many companies depend on in-house staff, or their independent distributors, when they need translations. They prefer not to use a professional translation service. Usually, the thinking goes something like this:
“We’ll let our distributor in country X translate our product datasheet — they (or their staff) are fluent, and it will save us time and money.”
Unfortunately, too often the opposite result occurs and companies end up spending more time and money than they need to. Furthermore, the result is often an inferior translation; and for a greater cost than they would have paid if they had opted to outsource the translation to a professional service. Why? The following are a few reasons:
Professional Quality
While it’s true that your distributor in Germany, for example, will have employees who are fluent German speakers — this doesn’t necessarily mean that they can perform a quality translation from English. What level of command do they have of the English language? What kind of linguistic background do they have? How will they handle tough idiomatic challenges or English words/phrases that simply do not make sense in German? Finally, who will review their work?
Unexpected Costs and Problems
An in-house approach has several potential risks:
- A poor translation can fail to accurately capture a marketing message, or communicate technical details.
- Ending up with different messages in different markets, therefore losing brand consistency.
- The danger of mistranslating product warnings, and other legal content — this is simply too important to hand over to non-professional translators.
Handing translation work off to distributors, or another non-professional, can create a nightmare in terms of coordination. Suppose your company has a product datasheet that you need translated into seven languages. Consider how much time could pass before all seven distributors get around to doing the work? Although the distributor has the most incentive to get the materials translated, this kind of project can frequently end up on the back-burner!
Imagine one translator has a casual, informal style and another writes in cold, technical terminology? Imagine if someone decides he can make improvements to the original text? Are you happy with that? If so, do you then pass on those comments to the other six? And again, who is going to review the translations when complete?
Consider, if you are spending a lot of time chasing down translators, you are not performing other responsibilities. You are not concentrating on your core business. The time cost, and the hassle, could be substantial.
A Professional Translation Service
When you entrust your translations to a professional translation service, such as QuickSilver Translate, you are guaranteed the highest possible quality of translation and an extremely competitive rate. Our integrated processes also mean that all the hassle associated with translation in the way described above is removed.
Technical and brand terminology
Ideally, we like to establish a Glossary of your preferred terminology before we start. This will save time and streamline the review of the translation later. If possible, share your internal style guides, glossaries and/or resources. If you have a Brand Book, we’d love to see it. Otherwise a brief intro to your brand is really useful.
Target Market/Audience
Explaining the project details — such as the purpose of the document and the target audience — to your project manager will help them to select the best translator(s). And help the translator choose the correct register and style for the translation. For example, a marketing campaign directed toward young (18-24 year) Spaniards in Madrid; would be pitched quite differently from one aimed at middle-aged, professional Cuban-Americans in Miami!
Design and DTP
Consider document layout: Who will be responsible for inserting the different versions of the translated text back into the text boxes and graphics? For ensuring that the index and cross-references are accurate? For re-flowing the layout and page breaks, and for regenerating the table of contents?
Did you know that translating from English to Spanish will result in around 30% more text? If English is the source language of the document, then nearly all the translations will occupy more space. Therefore the original document must be modified to accommodate the longer text; either in advance, or by tweaking the translated document in order to make the translation fit.
We offer an integrated Design and Layout service which will streamline the translation process, as well as reducing costs, maximising translation ROI, and ensuring an accurate representation of your original document. In other words, you send us your original files (in InDesign, Word, Powerpoint, etc) and we send you back the completed document, ready to deploy!
Timeline
We believe in agreeing to a time-frame, and sticking to it. Nothing is more annoying than not receiving a document, however small, in time for a meeting, presentation, product launch or other deadline.
