Choosing a Translation Agency: A Buyer's Guide
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Translating your business documents into another language is a tricky business. You want to make sure that your meaning is being conveyed precisely to your target audience but, being untutored in the target language, you have no way of checking for yourself how well this is being done.
Choosing a professional translation agency carefully is therefore of paramount importance. But what criteria should you be using and what qualities should you be looking for in the supplier of your translation services?
This Buyers’ Guide will introduce you to the fundamentals of translation and take you through the process of hiring a company that delivers your translations on time and in the exact style and tone you require.
The Basics: Lost in Translation
We’ve all read documents that have been poorly translated into English and either been puzzled by their meaning, laughed at the unintended humour or been turned off by the seeming lack of professionalism.
Whatever it is your company needs to translate into another language you certainly want to avoid these pitfalls – poor quality translations can harm your business image, lose you customers or even leave you exposed to legal action, even if the original document in English was perfection itself.
A translation agency will have a number of translators on its books that specialise in certain languages and document types. A top agency will be able to meet any translation requirement including:
- Legal documents
- Financial documents
- Medical and pharmaceutical documents
- Sales and marketing material
- Websites
- Employee handbooks or other internal communications
- Information pamphlets
- Press releases
Assessing Your Translation Needs
The first step in outsourcing your translation needs is deciding the complexity, volume and frequency of translation you require.
- Complexity: If the material you’re translating is intended to be read by anyone with a primary school level of education then you won’t need specialist translators. If you want very technical language translated you might need to spend a bit longer looking for a translation agency that can handle it. Similarly, if you need a document translated into several languages you’ll need to find an agency that covers them all.
- Volume: Large amounts of material that need to be translated quickly might require several pairs of hands (and eyes) and only be a suitable job for a larger agency.
- Frequency: A one-off job in one language is a suitable task for a freelance translator but if you expect to have more requirements in the future it may be sensible to hire an agency who can guarantee to have people available to handle the work.
What to Look for in a Translation Agency
Finding translation agencies is a fairly straightforward process – a simple Google search will throw up pages and pages of results. Comparing them however is a much more difficult task. After all, how do you judge the quality of their work when it’s in a language you don’t read?
The following list of factors should help you in your decision of which translation agency to hire:
- Experience: A credible agency with a good resume will have testimonials from previous clients and/or be able to provide references. They may also feature case studies on their website which you can browse.
- Personnel: Find out how the translation agency recruits and vets the translators. Check how the translators are categorised by language and specialist subject - ideally translators should only be translating into their mother tongue and more than a couple of ‘specialities’ should be viewed with suspicion.
- Suitability: If your job requires expertise in legal or technical language then this should be listed as one of the translation agencies’ areas of specialty and the translator to whom the work is allocated should list this among their skills. Try to find out as much as possible about this translator – make sure they’ve done a significant amount of work for the agency before and that the work has been of a high standard.
- Additional services: A piece of translation should always be proof read to check for errors and sense. Does the translation agency provide this service or will you have to find an independent proof reader? While this might be easy for common languages like Spanish and French it will be much more difficult to find a proof reader for rarer tongues. Other ancillary services that might be on offer include editing, typesetting and web publishing.
- Price: Obtaining and comparing quotes for translation is a fairly straightforward task – the job doesn’t vary between different agencies and you can send the document that needs to be translated to obtain an accurate price. You can then use the quotes to select the company that offers quality work at a competitive rate. Be wary of an agency that comes back with a price significantly lower than the average as this normally implies lower quality work.
Working with a Translation Agency
Once you’ve selected a company be prepared to work with the translator to assure the quality of the work, supplying them with any extra material they might need such as background reading to provide context or a glossary of terms for more technical work. The translator might come back to you with questions or requests for additional information – a sign that they are taking the project seriously and that suitable attention is being paid to the details.
Translation – especially of technical documents – does take time, so be realistic in your expectations of how soon the translated text can be delivered. Some agencies might charge extra for a fast turnaround.
