“You need your text translated by a professional? And you need it proof-read? Right, and before going to print you need a really thorough double and triple check and, what’s that?, you need it all formatted professionally? By next Thursday? Yeah….of course we can do that. Trust me!”

Think about what you’re doing.

You’ve created some text. Obviously it’s important because (1) otherwise you wouldn’t have written it, and (2) you need it translated.

So if it’s important, what are you doing entrusting your important work to someone you don’t know and, by extension, cannot trust?

When you need translation services for the first time, look for companies that have independent quality accreditation. This must be the only thing you should trust. Don’t believe all the marketing hype. From there, talk to the agencies about workflow, services, costs, and so on. A little investment and information gathering will reap rewards.

If you already use a translation agency, you’re probably disinclined to find another one but maybe you should think again. A back-up can only be a good thing. And sharing your business keeps both translation agencies competitive: improving their services to give you more.

If you’d like a free one-pager with hints and tips on how to choose your first – or your next – translation agency, just send an email to info@intrawelt.co.uk

Budgets are tighter than ever and it’s a natural response to try to look for cheaper options. But this could be a false economy. If you buy a really cheap t-shirt, you can guarantee that after half a dozen washes it will have lost its shape and will look like a really cheap t-shirt. So do you buy another cheap t-shirt or do you buy quality and wear a good-looking t-shirt for much longer?

Many translation agencies, to reduce costs but to maintain their profit, simply choose cheaper freelance translators or squeeze their translators to accept less money. Both are bad.

Cheaper freelance translators usually produce poorer quality work: they rush their work, don’t follow the client’s terminology, or, let’s be honest, just aren’t very good.

Squeezing good translators creates resentment and only forces these people to work quicker, under stress, and thereby produce more human errors. Making the proof-readers job bigger than it was, so, in effect, you’ve saved on the translator but lost on the proof-reader.

The option that we recommend is that you and your translation agency work together to optimise the process: how can things be changed to reduce cost? Could the source text be shortened? Rather than a “word-for-word” translation, would a “summarised” translation be acceptable (rendering 5,000 English words to 1,000 French)?

In addition, we have many partnerships with companies where, upon reaching a certain threshold, either a discount is applied, or certain credits are made available. If you’re someone who regularly needs short phrases translated, we have an extremely simple workflow with fast turnaround and very, very competitive prices. In short, we believe that the translation agency should start acting like your partner and should start providing free “consultancy” (for want of a better term) to help you get more for less.

You can choose an overweight, sloppy, lazy, unfit translation agency. Or you could choose an efficient, alert, finely-tuned one.

Aston, City, Heriot Watt, Edinburgh, Imperial College, London Metropolitan, Middlesex, Roehampton, University College, Bath, Birmingham, Bristol, East Anglia, Essex, Exeter, Hull, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Portsmouth, Salford, Sheffield, Surrey, West of England, Wales, Warwick, Westminster.

Just some of the universities in the UK offering post-graduate (MA or MSc) degree courses in translation.

These universities offer translation PhD courses:
University of Edinburgh
Imperial College London
University College London
University of East Anglia
University of Manchester
University of Wales (Swansea)

Courses vary, obviously, but there is still quite a lot of overlap:

• Specialised translation with translation technology
• Principles and strategies of translation
• Translation project management
• Professional skills
• Business
• Business operations
• Researsh methodologies
• Approaches to translaiton
• Business translation
• Lexicography
• Terminology

Before we can start using a translator, we have to check their experience and background. Although the UNI EN 15038 translation standard requires this, we check a person’s CV for another reason – to avoid “churn”.

It’s a marvellous word isn’t it, “churn”.

Imagine this:

1. You ask a company to translate your text.


2. The translation comes back.


3. You send it to your offices in Japan to review.


4. They return the text with lots of corrections.


5. You send the text to the translation company.


6. They update it, send it back.


7. You send it back to Japan.


8. They send back more corrections.


9. And so on and so on.

This is churn. It’s wasting effort and time and money.

Before we start using a translator, we look at their education, we look at their experience and we ask them to do some test translations. We do this because we don’t like churn.

We prefer to work like this:

1. You ask a company to translate your text.


2. The translation comes back.


3. You send it to your offices in Japan to review.


4. They thank you.

That’s how we prefer to work. What about you?

source: http://www.lexicool.com/courses_uk.asp

Let’s start off by making a few assumptions. Ok, so you’ve read “How to choose a Translation Partner (part 1)“. And you agree that translation agencies should be more, what shall we say, trustworthy because, well, they have a business name and…

…but hang on! Can’t any Tom, Dick or Harry set up a Translation Agency?

Of course they can! And that was kinda the tongue-in-cheek point I was trying to make in Part 1.

The translation industry is easy to get into: Computer? check. Internet? check. Speak one language? check. Speak another language? che…..well I get by in French.

If a freelancer might be anything but modest, think what a translation agency might do to win business.

Our advice is “Trust No One”.

But take heart because “The Truth Is Out There”.

We feel that if you need something translated, you should get a quality job. Full stop. And by that, I mean that the translation should meet your needs. If you need a contract translated and sworn as a true translation, that’s one thing. If you need an email translated, that’s potentially something quite different. But in each case, you need a translation.

In 20 years of translation, we’ve never heard these conversations:

client: “I need this translated. English to German. By Friday. It’s ok if the translation’s crap.”

client: “How much will it cost?”
agency: “500 euro.”
client: “hmmm. What about a crap translation? how much is that?”
agency: “Ah…that’s on offer right now. Crap only costs 200 euro”.

Our advice – and you see it time and again here – is to look for independent quality certification. We think the important ones are:
ISO 9001 – obviously!
UNI EN 15038 (translation services)
UNI EN 10574 (interpreting services)

It’s very important to look for independent certification. Just ask your translation partner for a copy of their certificate. It’s in a convenient PDF document. Then check the details. It’s easy. It costs nothing. But could save you a packet.

Whilst it’s true that freelancers will be cheaper than translation agencies, do you really want to check the credentials of every freelancer? Of course not. You need to concentrate on your business.

Our business is translation and part of UNI EN 15038 gives very clear instruction on how to select and manage translators. What that means is that when we say we review, assess, evaluate and continually monitor our translators, we mean it. Because that’s what the quality certification demands.

In short, trust independent quality assessments. Then trust the companies that hold them.

You’ve got a website. The designers were pretty expensive but, hey, it was worth it – the website looks brilliant. Now you’re thinking about translating it into French and German because you’ve got some pretty big customers in those countries and there’s more money to be made there. Just do a quick search on Google and…..wow! millions of translators and translation agencies.

You have many options from freelancers to the biggest “Language Service Providers” and each comes with their own advantages and disadvantages.

Freelancers

Probably the cheapest. And probably the highest risk. All it takes is a computer and an internet connection to set yourself up as a freelance translator. A professional-looking website costs very little and buying Google Adwords isn’t expensive. But how can you tell if the freelancer is good, bad or ugly? If I were unscrupulous, I could list my (fake) degree, my (fake) experience and even my (fake) clients. And I know you can’t read German so you can’t judge my work. As long as it looks German, you’ll be happy.

Translation Agencies (or Language Service Providers)

Not the cheapest. But there is a range from reasonable to “they-can’t-be-serious-can-they?”.

I can’t speak about all agencies but Intrawelt works like this:
We use freelance translators and reviewers. We’ve got over 500 with whom we work regularly. We test everyone. We check every CV – calling universities to confirm degrees. We take up every reference. We test their language skills – they have to do a sample translation. If we can’t assess their language skills ourselves, we use external trusted sources (such as universities, or known and trusted translators)

In short, we make absolutely certain that our freelancers are qualified, experienced, and capable.

Then we make sure that they continue to improve their skills by attending courses, workshops, conferences, etc. and by continuing to translate or review in their language combination(s), in their area of expertise. Because if someone’s qualified and experienced but hasn’t translated for 10 years, how current are their language skills?

That’s why many companies choose translation agencies. Because only we can guarantee freelancers and only we can guarantee quality.