Making The Most Of A Translator’s Services

In today’s global marketplace, appealing to an international audience may be not just an advantage but a necessity for your business or web site. Speaking to your customers in their language gives them reassurance that you will cater to their needs. Speaking to them in clear, well-written language leaves them with a positive impression of your business that may clinch the sale.
Unless you have the resources to employ full time multilingual copywriters, chances are that you’ll be appealing to the services of a professional translator. Translators are sometimes viewed with an air of suspicion, and as a translator and language specialist myself, I can empathise with this to some extent. It’s the same problem that arises when you call a plumber or electrician: you need their services, but you may not fully understand or have the means to judge their work. You’ve possibly had a bad experience in the past, such as a translation being delivered late, or turning out to have mistakes in it. So in this article I hope to give some hints from “my side of the fence” on how you can alleviate these problems, understand what you can expect from a translation service and ultimately make that service work for you. I’ll focus specifically here on some aspects of budget and organisation, though I’ll mention the editorial process briefly.
Attitude
A key underlying point to getting the most out of translation is actually the attitude you have towards it. Remember that a good translator is on your side and will be continually trying to make their translation achieve your purposes: be that making your publicity material sound more convincing in order to get more sales, or making the text of your internal documents as explanatory as possible so that your collaborators understand them quickly. Either way, a good translation can make or save you money in the long run. So you should view the translation work as a valuable part of your business strategy, not simply a boring, administrative task to be done as cheaply as possible at the last minute. It’s really a false economy to shave 50 Euros off the cost of a translation only for this to result in a lesser quality job that gets you fewer sales over the course of a whole year. Similarly, asking for an “urgent” translation to be rushed may not actually save you any time overall if your colleagues then need twice as long to digest the document because it’s less clearly written.
Being clear from the outset
So, the next point is that you need to be clear about your time and money budget. As a rough guide, you should ideally allow one day for every 2,000 words of text that need translating, and in any case a minimum of two days to allow the translator proper time to do any necessary research and consultancy. Depending on your needs and the speciality of the text, you should budget for around 50 to 80 Euros per 1,000 words of source text at the very least, and for more to accommodate any special requirements or additional proofreading. (Unusual language pairs will also usually involve extra cost.) This may sound a little expensive and time-consuming, but as I mentioned, the investment will generally pay for itself in the long run.
If you state no preference, a translator will generally propose a timescale that they are confident that they can meet. If you need the translation sooner or one of your documents is of higher priority than the others, state this from the beginning. Changing the timescale part way through the project is generally not a good idea, because the translator may have agreed, for example, to get feedback from consultants and work back from collaborators at a particular time, and re-scheduling this process may then involve cutting corners.
Working with budget constraints
If you really need to budget for less money or time than would be recommended by default, then be up front about it with the translator from the outset and make sure that the translator is up front about what corners are being cut to achieve your budget. Translators such as myself who work in tandem with other collaborators can often work around a lower budget or tight time constraints. For example, part of the work can be outsourced to a student translator who will charge less money (but where the work will still then be subject to some minimal checking by a more experienced translator), or portions allocated to multiple translators to get the job done more quickly. Or it may be that the translator or one of their collaborators has recently worked on a similar document which they can use as a basis for completing your job more quickly. But in any case, they should be transparent about this and you should understand the implications. If a translator agrees to a suspiciously cheap price or short timescale without explaining how they’re able to achieve it, alarm bells should be ringing.
Ask the translator if they can offer any other options for cutting the budget. For example, they may offer a discount in exchange for a link to their web site. An option I offer with my own translation service is a discount in exchange for sentences from the resulting translation being included in a public on-line database of example translations. (An interesting side effect is that this provides an additional guarantee of quality: why would I want to fill my database with bad translations?)
Note that professional translators will generally NOT agree to cost-cutting by not including names or repetitions. This is a cowboy practice which in particular some agencies try to demand and which can compromise the quality of the translation. Any translator that agrees to this practice is being unprofessional, and you should ask yourself what other unprofessional practices they’ll also be using behind your back to complete your translation.