Are you planning to expand abroad with your product or service, do you need to translate your parent company’s corporate guidelines or train your employees to operate a new machine, but the foreign language instruction manual is insufficient? This is just a brief list of situations where a professional translator should step in. Even if you think your HR manager or intern, who can communicate in English or German with ease, can handle the translation, this may not always be the case. And let’s be honest, you certainly don't want your company's name to be shown in a bad light, which unfortunately happens often owing to poor translation. Leaving aside the reputation of the company, everyone knows that mistakes cost money, and a bad translation can cost you not only money but also valuable time. How to avoid all this?
Have you decided on a professional translation? In the first place, thoroughly prepare the assignment you will hand over to the agency. It's not enough to send the text and the language into which it is to be translated, and the deadline by which the translator has to deliver the work. It is important to give the agency as much information as possible, which will save both parties a lot of time and thereby your money. Tell the translator why the text is important, what it is for, where it will be published and who it is intended for. There are often situations where the translation is aimed at a different audience than the original text, which must be taken into account in the translation through the so-called localisation. Do not be afraid to share your specific translation requirements, e.g. if you wish to have certain parts of the text translated depending on other materials and documents. You can also ask what other information may be useful. In short, open communication is a key factor in getting your text translated exactly the way you need it.
If you don't want to waste the resources you have set aside for translation, don't forget this guide to saving time and money. When you send your texts to the translator for translation, send them to in editable files - e.g. in a Word or XML file. This will significantly speed up the entire translation process. Like any modern translation agency, we use CAT tools to analyse the text to be translated and estimate how long it will take us to translate the documents. If we do not have an editable original from the client, we are able to deal with any format, but this increases the time and thus the financial rate for the translation. So if you don't have an editable format handy, try searching for the original author and asking them to send it to you.
A great help in the translator's work is a so-called translation memory. Its principle consists in storing already translated sentences and shorter sentence units in a database, which is then used by the translator for thematically similar translations, thus significantly reducing the time spent on the entire job. So if you've entrusted your documents to someone who doesn't work with this tool, you'll probably pay more for the translation than you'd like.
Demand quality from your translator. This is the only way to avoid potential losses that can be caused by a bad, albeit cheap, translation. Find out what experience they have, if they can give you references or show you some of their translations. As we mentioned at the beginning, communication is key, not only from your side to the translator, but also vice versa. Is your translation supplier willing to discuss your wishes and comments? Then you are well on your way to a quality translation.
Do you need a high-quality translation of technical documents, marketing texts or technical articles? We work with more than 200 language combinations, so don't hesitate to contact us. Perhaps just for a non-binding quote.
