In today's global marketplace, attracting an international audience can not only be an advantage, but a necessity for your business or website. Talking to your clients in their language gives them the assurance that they meet their needs. Talking to them in a clear, well-written language leaves them with a positive impression of your business that can close sales.
Unless you have the resources to hire full-time multilingual copywriters, you are likely to turn to a professional translator. Translators are sometimes viewed with a suspicion of suspicion, and as a translator and language specialist I can to some extent be empathic with this. It's the same problem that comes up 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 may have had a bad experience in the past, such as a translation being delivered late or mistaken. So in this article, I hope to give some "my fence page" tips on how to remedy these issues, understand what to expect from a translation service, and ultimately make this service work for you. I will specifically focus here on some aspects of the budget and organization, though I will briefly mention the editorial process.
attitude
An underlying key point to get the most out of the translation is actually your attitude towards it. Keep in mind that a good translation company london is on your side and will constantly try to get your translation to fulfill its purpose: that your promotional material sounds more compelling for more sales, or that the text of its internal documents is as explanatory as possible so that your partners understand quickly. Either way, a good translation can make or save money in the long run. That is why you should see translation work as a valuable part of your business strategy, not just a tedious administrative task to be done as cheaply as possible at the last minute. It really is a counterfeit economy to save 50 euros on the cost of a translation, just because this results in lower quality work that allows you to get less sales over a full year. Similarly, asking for an "urgent" translation to speed up may not save you time in general if your colleagues need twice as much time to digest the document because it is less clearly written.
Be ready from the start
Therefore, the next point is that you need to be aware of your time and money budget. As a rough guide, the ideal is to give one day for every 2,000 words of text that needs translation, and in any case at least two days to give the translator enough time to do the necessary research and advice. Depending on your needs and the specialty of the text, you must budget at least between 50 and 80 euros for every 1,000 words of source text as a minimum and for more to meet any specific requirement or further revision. (Unusual language pairs also incur extra costs.) This may seem a little expensive and time consuming, but as I mentioned, the investment will generally pay for itself in the long run.
If you do not declare preference, a translator will generally suggest a schedule that you are sure you can meet. If you need the translation before, or if one of your documents has a higher priority than the others, specify it from the start. It is generally not a good idea to change the timeline midway through the project, as the translator may have accepted, for example, receiving feedback from consultants and collaborating with partners at a specific time, and rescheduling this process may involve cutting corners.
Work on budget constraints
If you really need to budget for less money or time than would be recommended by default, be honest with the translator from the start and make sure the translator has a direct focus on what corners are cut to achieve your budget. Translators like me who work in tandem with other contributors can often work on a lower budget or with tight deadlines. For example, part of the work can be outsourced to a student translator who will charge less money (but where the work will still be subject to minimal verification by a more experienced translator), or parts assigned to more translators to get the job done. faster OR it may be that the translator or one of your partners has recently worked on a similar document that they can use as a basis to finish their work faster. But in any case, they have to be transparent about it and you have to understand.