Here are the top 11 secrets EVERY TRANSLATION BUYER should know:

1. Professional translation takes time

Asking for a 50,000-word document to be translated overnight will only make you look like a person who lacks common-sense. A professional translator will translate an average of 2,500 to 5,000 words per day depending on subject matter and complexity. Even a team with multiple translators will still have limits, so you should plan yourself ahead of time.

2. Schedule your translation for before you need it

This way, if your project gets delayed, you will not be affected. Translation projects are managed and provided by human beings. Human beings get sick, and different than some people think, no translation companies keep a team of translators sitting idle as a backup for when this happens.
Be diligent and avoid being caught in one of these situations. When this happens, many providers will simply tell you that “if they rush the quality of your project will suffer”…leaving all the loss and responsibility with you.

3. Translation memory will save you the most

Your provider should retain a memory of previous translations to avoid duplicate work in the future. Translation memories (aka TMs) will enable you to save money across documents and projects. Savings may be as high as 70% for clients. Note that translation memory is NOT the same as machine translation.

4. Translation and Interpretation

Translation is writing-based. It may be a hard-copy or a digital file being translated. As long as it is “writing” we will call it Translation.
Interpretation is the act of conveying the meaning of a spoken sentence in a different language. Interpretation is not translation. And, when you call a language service provider mixing up such basic terminology they will promptly know you don’t know a thing about the language services industry.

5. No serious translation company will sell you ‘Google Translation’

To think that a company will take your money and at the end deliver a machine translation like the one provided by Google Translate is simply naïve.
Most translation providers will deliver what we call TEP, which means Translation + Editing + Proofing. Translation is done by the main translator(s) while the editing is done by another translator (or translators if a project is large), and finally the whole material will be proofed before delivery.

Human translation remains pretty central to the translation service industry.

7. Machine Translation is actually useful for few specific purposes

Machine translation is mostly helpful for “exploratory translation”. In cases where a client would need hundreds of thousands of pages translates a human translation would be economically unfeasible. In such cases the client usually need to know the meaning of the documents without a quality required for publishing. There are some steps that can increase the quality of machine translation and make it substantially better than what you would get from free tools such as the Google Translate.

8. Make sure you really need everything translated

In some cases you don’t actually need a translation. For instance, when a law firm needs to go through several evidences in a foreign language to decide what to use in court. In such cases, a translator could provide a “summary” of each document after reading the batch. This would enable the law firm to decide which documents would really need translation saving big bucks.

9. What is the right price for translation?

Large language translation providers usually charge the most. You should ask yourself if you really need all the whistles and bells they offer. And, some of your money will be going to things such as expensive advertising and rock-star sales people that you don’t necessarily need.

Tiny small translations or individual translators, on the other hand, may represent a risk that do not justify the lower rate. Such providers, when facing unexpected situations like problems in their families or a missing main translator, may take the decision to outsource your job to amateur translators instead of letting you know about the problem.

Medium-size translation providers without the high overheads that large companies have and with enough resources to safely take care of your assignments are usually the best choice.

10. Avoid the temptation to do it yourself

Professional translation is a technical business. Just because you have a bilingual in your team it doesn’t mean you can get a document professionally translated.
The value added by a translation company includes translator recruiting, project management, quality control, desktop publishing, conversion of currencies and measures, and operations with different kinds of files and software.
That’s why teachers, academics, and students will not be a good choice as well.

11. Must requirements for the translators work in your project

These requirements are the minimum acceptable for a professional translation to be published: (1) translator is native in the target language, (2) translator is experienced in the subject matter being translated, (3) translator is committed to provide quality translations.

Why a translation memory?

A translation memory is the single thing that can save you the most when buying translation. Such memory represents a retrievable archive of everything being translated for your company. This way, when you need a slightly different version of something already translated in the past you don’t need to pay for the whole thing again.

One main advantages of this memory is that you don’t need to “remember” that something similar was translated in the past. This is done automatically by the support TMS (Translation Management Systems) that main providers use.

Another advantage is that even for documents quite different some savings may be achieved. Think about things like headers and footers and other information from your company that remain reasonably unchanged over time. You shouldn’t be dinged every time this content is sent for translation. A good TM will retrieve such past translation over and over again saving you big bucks as well.

Translation memories work really well with technical translations. Whether you need a technical German to English translation or a translation from English to Spanish, a translation memory can bring you many benefits.

What is a translation memory?

A Translation Memory is a file that is created at the beginning of your relationship with your provider. After that, this TM will increase in size and content. Today’s technology support a virtually unlimited size for such memories. However, for the sake of manageability some companies will keep a TM for each department or branch – for instance.

This is a copy of how a Translation Memory look like. This one is the most adopted technology everywhere.

Who will provide me with a TM?

Your language service provider is supposed to advise you about that from the get-go. Not all providers share about this memory with their clients altough virtually all of them will use this technology to their own advantage.

It is important that you feel confident that your provider will actually share the savings from this technology with you. A main evidence that your provider will do so is when they share spontaneously about this technology. If you need to ask them about the potential savings coming from repetition, this may be a sign that they will be reluctant about extending this benefit to you.

Remember your provider will be the one creating and managing the memory. It is quite rare for clients – even large corporations – to manage their own translations. However, it is important that your provider do share a copy of the TM every now and then. This way, if you need to take your business elsewhere you are able to that without losing everything you have accumulated in this TM.

Translation memory is not just about savings. It is also about quality and consistency.

Think about a technical document. You don’t want a certain technical term to be translated in ten different ways. You want the same translation to be used consistently throughout a document, a project, or a large set of content veicles.

A translator – even a seasoned professional one – may forget about how he has translated a technical term written 2 months ago. The TM will help by “retrieving” the translation of this term and “showing” to the translator when he reaches such term again.

Now imagine a team of translators working in a large project with hundreds of documents. It is key that a TM is shared over a server so all these professionals may be supported by the same terminology being retrieved when necessary.

Keeping a close communication with the person or area in charge of your publishing can also save you a lot. One of the most famous reasons of waste in translation is the lack of “editable graphics” sent to the translation providers. You don’t need to understand any of these technical aspects. Just make sure you provide a communication bridge between your translation provider and the party in charge of publishing your materials and you will avoid a lot of waste.

Save big by providing the right type of files

Translation companies charge for their time to convert files types when necessary.

The number one cause of extra costs related to file types are the “PDFs”. PDFs are not “editable” so they need to be converted by the translation provider in order to be used in the translation process. To make things worse this conversion is rarely 100% successful so some level of manual post-conversion adjustment may be required.

All this work, as well as a fraction of the tools being used, will be paid by YOU. Therefore, it would be in your best interest to provide the original file, which were actually used to generate the PDFs. The following table shows a few cases and what to do to save big.

Tip: some times you will be charged for this work as a separate item called “DTP”, which stands for Desktop Publishing. Other times, your translation provider will simply built-in this cost into the “per-word” rates being charged for the translation itself.

For corporate buyers of large translation projects

Although a bit too technical for the usual corporate buyer, it is important to note that the graphics usually inside of a “graphic package” should be editable as well. This situation is common for machinery manuals, educational publications, newspapers, magazines, etc.

Think about a jpg or a gif or a bmp graphic. Even the non-technical user usually knows that these formats are NOT editable. If you happen to provide this kind of graphic to your provider they will need to manually edit each one of these graphics. This is easily done with a program such as Adobe Illustrator. However, all the time spent on these editing procedures will be charged additionally to your project.

At the end of each translation project just ask for….

…your Translation Memory and Glossary.

These two things will help wonders in case you need to change providers in the future. A glossary will help the new translators to hit the ground running since they know the translations previously used for the most important technical terms.

The Translation Memory will enable the new translation provider to leverage on all the past projects completed for your company.