Fred Brooks’ book, “The Mythical Man Month” (buy it now at Amazon), so famous within the software engineering world that it makes your eyes sting, is applicable to almost every field of human endeavour.

I read the book over 25 years ago so you might think that the fundamentals of software engineering haven’t changed all that much. Well, I’m not sure about that, but I do think that our fundamental approach to projects (whatever project in whatever field) hasn’t changed.

We received a call on Tuesday: 150,000 words had to be translated from Italian into English by Friday morning.  To be precise, the call was on Tuesday afternoon and delivery was required Friday morning first thing.

72 hours (not even) to translate 150,000 words is roughly 2,000 words an hour (most translators do 2,000 words a day and don’t tend to work 24 hours a day). And that’s not counting any revision or quality checks. In order to hit the delivery, a veritable troupe of translators was created and set to work. [Not sure if there is a collective noun for translators but although the alliteration is ok, maybe a "symposium of translators" would be better...thoughts on a postcard to...]

Even with the best will in the world, a rush job is a rush job. Quality kinda goes out the window. And with so many translators involved, consistency kinda goes out the window. The only positive, I suppose, is that the price kinda goes out the window too – the client will pay whatever it takes.

If our translation were a piece of software it would be so horribly bug-ridden that it would be unusable; in fact it probably wouldn’t even run. But bugs in software are easy to see. “Bugs” in a translation are quite different – that’s why we do proof-reading and quality checks. That’s why simply applying more resources, as Mr Brooks says, isn’t the answer.

Whichever way I look at this job, I cannot see how we don’t end up snookered. If we had turned the job down, the client would simply have found another translation agency to say “yes”. And we might have lost the client forever. It’s certainly a risk. But in doing the job, despite every caveat, the client might still complain about the translation quality and might decide to choose another agency anyway.

But what really keeps me awake at night is the client. It must have taken weeks if not months to produce the original document. 150,000 words is a pretty chunky print job. If I had been the author of that document, I wonder how I’d feel if my company valued the translation at three days’ worth.

Now before you start replying with “yes but” -  sometimes emergencies happen, someone can make a mistake – let’s think about the consequences. What if the document is a company prospectus and is being used to seek investments for millions of pounds. How much would you invest, knowing that the 200-page English document you’re reading was translated in three days by 30 different translators?

Fortunately, this wasn’t this case, but it makes you wonder, doesn’t it…exactly where will that translation go? and exactly how will it be used?

“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.

Nowadays, there seems to be just too much information and too many choices. How many different breakfast cereals do we really need, for instance? And how many different cups of coffee does Starbucks need to invent?

And so we come to the “crisis”. Whilst almost everyone agrees that 2009 is over, there is debate on the c-word because people tend to look at whatever statistic supports their belief. With GDP, unemployment rates, interest rates, consumer spending, and so on and so forth, everyone’s able to pick their statistic and cling to it.

Whether or not the crisis is over, what counts even more at this time is the quality to cost ratio. Every translation agency will tell you that they deliver quality (well, what else are they going to say?) but how does that explain some agencies charging twice what we charge?

The large translation agencies invest lots of resources in sales, marketing and IT. Many are public companies and, to protect their share price, they have to deliver strong quarter-on-quarter results. But did you know that in these companies, the actual cost of the translator could be as little as 20% of the price you pay?

Let’s compare four ways to get your translation done.

1) Go direct to freelance resources
On the face of it, this is the cheapest route. But don’t forget that you have to find the resources, verify their competence somehow, possibly prepare documents for them, project manage everything, then possibly take their translation and format it. Do you have the skills and personnel to do this?

2) Go to Intrawelt

3) Go to a large translation agency

4) Go to one of the (very large) top-30 global translation agencies

Nearly every translation agency uses freelance translators. So let’s assume that the translation, proof-reading and quality check costs are the same.

Because Intrawelt is a private company, we don’t answer to shareholders and we grow at a healthy, sustainable pace. Our sales, marketing, IT and other costs are kept to a minimum. We still like to make a profit, though!

Large companies and public companies have greater overheads and invest heavily in sales and marketing and IT and so on. Look at SDL, for example, in their Annual Report (http://www.sdl.com/en/company/investors/financialoverview.asp), their overall administrative expenses for 2008 were £61.3 million. Lionbridge’s annual report for the same year (http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=111612&p=irol-irhome) shows that just their sales and marketing spend was US $33 million.

Now we all know that businesses need to make money. But when your receive the next invoice from your translation company, ask yourself what percentage of that cost was actually used to translate. And what percentage went to pay for overheads, sales and marketing.

In this graph, we show how the translation tasks are, more or less, the same, but the overhead expenses increase drastically. When you pay for a translation project, think about how much you’re paying for your translation and how much you’re contributing to their overheads.

freelance translators have only their own cost but by going direct to a freelancer, you have the overhead of project management and finding and assessing the translator. Do you have these skills in place?
Intrawelt keeps overheads to a minimum to save you money.
large translation agencies spend much more on sales and marketing – costs that they pass onto you.
very large translation agencies spend millions on marketing and have huge overheads. But the translator’s cost is, more or less, the same as ours.

Very interesting couple of days today. Obviously I can’t mention names or give away too many details but it’s been an eye-opener. Maybe I’m just a little naive – you decide.

A very eminent person contacted us. Not a fabulously wealthy person but one whose name reaches places other names don’t. If I were to tell you who, you’d say, “what, HIM?” And I’d reply, “Yes, HIM”. With a rather self-satisfied air because I had actually come into contact with him.

Anyway, you get the picture. Someone eminent.

He needed a translation done. No urgency but he was going to publish it and, since it would carry HIS name, the quality had to be top, top notch.

We gave our best quote and emphasised that our translator would be one of the best we have, an expert in this field. Our reviewer, similarly, would be another of our top linguists in this field. And we’d do a final, double, double-double quality check in-house to make sure it was super top, top notch quality.

We didn’t get the order.

Why not? We called HIM back to ask.

Despite our emphasis on quality, which was simply an echo of the customer’s needs, we were asking more than the competition. The client, this eminent man, told us he went with a company that was asking 7p per word. The translation was from German to English. The company that won the order allegedly will do a translation, review and quality check. And presumably they’ll make a little profit too. All for 7p per word.

If someone tries to sell you a new BMW for a couple of grand, the alarm bells start going, don’t they? What’s wrong with it? Is it nicked? Whatever it is, you know something’s not quite right.

If Del-boy Trotter tries to sell you a “genuine” Rolex from his rather tatty suitcase “down the market”, you know something’s not right, right?

So when a translation agency promises a high-quality medical translation from German to English, with a professional review by another German-English linguist, followed by an in-house double check, all for 7p per word…

Well, you get the picture.

An experienced, qualified, professional German-English translator – a freelancer, without translation agency overheads and without a reviewer / quality check – will cost a minimum of 6p per word. Good reviewers could ask one third of that (sometimes more) – another 2p. That’s 8p per word without the agency costs let alone any profit for the agency.

Something just doesn’t seem right.

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.