Whether you are opening an office in a new global market or just traveling on business to another country, the language barrier can be a real challenge. While English is spoken by most people in business across the world, it isn’t spoken well. Many people there prefer doing business in their own tongue. Pay attention to this, and you stand a better chance at getting ahead. The first step to doing business in a foreign language, then, is to look for translation services. With help from such a service, you get to correspond with foreign businesses in the language they are most comfortable in (if you are interested in actual real-time conversations in a foreign language, you need an interpreter and not a translator).
Professional translation services do more than to merely translate business documents and email for you. They also offer you local perspective and cultural insight when you design a website or a marketing plan. Top-notch professional translation services often act as all round guides to businesses in foreign markets.
If you wonder about computer translation services, you should set the very thought aside. Computer translation programs and services are laughably inadequate. Hiring a translator is tough work. It isn’t enough to merely find someone who can translate your words into another language. Real translation involves cultural bridging, as well.
You need to follow the right process when hiring translation services. The following is a short guide on how this process should go.
Understand the translation requirements of your business
Any translation needs that you may have, you need to first determine whether you need a translation service, a freelance translator or, if your need is for regular, long-standing work, and on-staff translator on a permanent basis.
There are a number of specific areas that you need to look at to work out what kind of translation help you need. Are translators easily available on a freelance basis? What is the typical turnaround time? How much use do you expect to have for translators on a regular basis? How tough is your translation work? These are some of the questions you need to ask yourself.
If you only need translation into French, German or another widely spoken language for a familiar culture and if you don’t always need documents translated at a moment’s notice, you could easily look up professional freelance translators each time you have work without much trouble. If you need someone to translate a technical document into Afrikaans (involving economic and stock market information, perhaps), though, you may have some trouble locating a good professional yourself. You could need to look for translation services then. They should have professionals on their payroll to get you the results you need.
Understand who exactly will do your translation work
Whether you wish to hire a freelance translator or a translation service, you need to check the translator’s qualifications. Checking his qualifications out, though, is no simple matter. Remember the following when you evaluate the translator.
1. To begin, you need to determine if the translator you are considering is qualified. Often, translation services merely offer you people who are bilingual. They may do casual jobs well but may drop the ball when it comes to complex, high level projects. As an analogy, you could say that the difference between a bilingual service provider and a qualified translator was similar to the difference between a competent driver and a Formula One racer. You need to make sure that you get a translator who is up to the job you have in mind.
2. The target language needs to be very strong. If you need a translator to translate business documents from English to Mandarin, the person you hire needs to be very strong in Mandarin even if his English is merely competent Understanding a sentence written perfectly in a language is easy. Creating a perfect sentence in another language isn’t.
3. Many business owners are surprised to learn that mere language competence isn’t enough. Sometimes, the area of knowledge a translation project deals with can be a factor in your choice of translator. If it’s a learned document on the economy or the stock market, it could be difficult for a translator without a background in these subjects to be effective. Some subject areas – legal ones especially – need a high level of subject competence to ensure accuracy. For work in such critical subject areas, it is important that you hire professional translation services.
4. Translation professionals are certified by the American Translators. A holder of an ATA translation certificate is guaranteed to be competent in the language pair that you are interested in.
5. In the end, you should always ask the translator you hire for a sample of his work to make sure of the quality.
You need to validate translation services, too
It isn’t enough to simply evaluate the credentials of the individual translators you are hiring. You also need to evaluate credentials of the company. Translation services get certified, too. This guarantees a certain basic level of quality.
Quality translation services often use a multiple level translation process to reduce the possibility of errors. Documents are translated by one good translator and checked by others.
You should look for translation services that use Translation Memory software. Documents can sometimes need the repeated use of one word or phrase. Use of this software allows the translator to translate the phrase or word once and leave it to the software to insert the right translated term everywhere that it appears. Not only does this minimize a translator’s workload, it leaves less scope for the occurrence mistakes.
In many kinds of businesses involved in scientific or legal work, documents need to meet industry standards before publication. Translation services are often the best choice for these projects – individual translators usually don’t have the expertise needed to guarantee specific industry norm compliance.
