When purchasing any professional service there are certain basic criteria that one should understand before engaging a service provider:
How can you assure me that the service is any good? i.e. Quality
How long is this going to take? i.e. Quickness
How much will it cost? i.e. Cost
The same holds true for translation services. If you’ve purchased translation services for years or you are about to do so for the first time the following information will be helpful to ensure you choose the best option for your organization.
Quality
There are two main types of translation – human and machine.
Human translation means that a professional translator will rewrite the document requiring translation (source document) into the requested language (target document). Most likely, however, you do not know the target language and so you still do not know whether the translation is accurate. The best way to ensure accuracy in human translation is to work with a professional translation services provider that has the infrastructure in place to recruit, vet, and test professional translators. Further, professional translation service providers will have a process where up to three separate translators – a translator, editor, and proofreader – will translate the document thus further reducing the likelihood of errors.
Machine translation is computer software that performs the translation. Generally speaking, machine translation quality is very low. However, it is useful for certain types of projects. Internal documents (e.g. emails) are a perfect example of where machine translation can be useful.
Bottom line: If there are consequences associated with your translation being wrong, human translation is the way to go.
Quickness
First of all, it is important to understand that there is an inverse relationship between speed and quality in translation. In other words, the faster you go, the worse the translation becomes, generally speaking. Here are some numbers to help you understand. A strong human translator can translate around 2,500 words per day. So if you have a 10,000 word project it will be a challenge to get that turned around in 24 hours with any level of quality. There are ways around this, however, and it goes back to dealing with a professional translation services provider. If you are working with one, they will have access to multiple teams and can divide the work among them in order to shorten the turn around time (TAT). This is not optimal from a quality perspective, but it is still much better than machine translation. You could still go the machine translation route, but there you really risk quality.
Bottom line: Speed is important, but if there are consequences associated with your translation being wrong, use the numbers above to budget enough time to allow a professional translation team to complete your project.
Cost
Virtually all professional translation companies will calculate the cost of a translation project based on the number of words in the document. This is because they use industry specific technology that analyzes a document based on the number of words it contains. I’ll save it for another post, but the technology does other interesting things as well which make it important to work with a professional translation services company. If you request a quote from a service provider and the quote comes back with costs broken down by the hour, by the page, or a flat project based fee, that is a big red flag. In rough numbers, per word costs for most translation projects should range between $0.15 and $0.30 cents per word. The range includes factors such as volume, subject matter, language pair, and turn around time which can all have an impact on price.
Bottom line: You get what you pay for in translation services. If there are consequences associated with your translation project being wrong, have a substantive conversation with your provider about costs and budget accordingly.
Frederick Marx is the CEO of Keylingo Translations™, a multi-language translation company with offices across the US and Canada. Keylingo Translations™ provides exceptional local service combined with global technology and infrastructure.