Friday, February 24, 2012

Why Choose a Preferred Language Service Provider


As many businesses are international or in search of growing to the point of becoming international, they require translation and/or localization services. The larger businesses that have various departments may have a need for materials translated for each department but may not have a specific “translation department” to handle these needs. As a result, each department that has a multilingual need assigns the translation projects to whichever language service provider they find. This can result in Company A translating marketing materials, while Company B translates the website, and Company C translates the Engineering Department’s business cards, for example. While there is nothing wrong with this approach to fulfilling your multilingual needs, choosing a preferred language service provider (LSP) to work with your company is more cost-effective and can drastically improve consistency.
Cost is one of the most important aspects to many businesses. This is why many people will choose to use a free machine translation in lieu of searching for a professional translation agency. We have discussed the dangers of using machine translation in past newsletters. Market research has concluded that the cost of professional translation is a minute number compared to the amount of revenue that it could bring in to the company. In fact, most businesses find that the cost of translation of a project is less than 1% of the total project revenue. On the other hand, a bad or incorrect translation – one of the leading dangers of machine translation – could end up costing your company quite a large amount of money.

By choosing a single agency to work with the various departments of your company, you could also lower cost because the agency may be able to work with you to stretch the budget further. Many agencies can offer volume discounts or other kinds of discounts, such as repetition discounts and discounts based on previous translations. Your preferred LSP will usually create a translation memory (TM) or glossaries from your projects and may be able to discount the project cost if you have phrases repeated that have been previously translated.

By creating these TMs and glossaries, you also improve consistency. The TM will record your previous translations to be referenced for future projects. This ensures that a word translated in one document will retain the same translation throughout the entire document, as well as in future projects.

In selecting a LSP to work with the various departments of your company, you can lower cost and improve consistency. PLG is dedicated to providing low-cost, high-quality translation, localization, and typesetting services. Our vast network of translators with various areas of expertise allows us to translate in virtually any language and subject matter.

For a free quote, please email us at plgquote@plg-online.com. We look forward to supporting all of your multilingual needs.

Project Highlight: TableCraft Annual Catalog


TableCraft Products Company is a family-owned leading manufacturer of products for the foodservice industry. The TableCraft website explains the reasons for its success in a few short words: Quality. Innovation. Exclusive designs. Listening to [their] customers. Because of the value provided by the company, it is the supplier of choice for top restaurants, chefs and other foodservice operations around the world. Throughout its 66 years in business, TableCraft has grown to provide high quality, low cost products to customers in over 60 countries worldwide.

Precision Language & Graphics recently partnered with TableCraft to translate their 2012 product catalog. With such a globally recognized name, TableCraft expected the same high quality in their translations as they provide to their customers with their over 3,000 products. PLG was happy to help them reach out to their global market.

Working with TableCraft and their design agency, Design Tower, PLG converted their 236-page catalog to metric measurements and translated another version to Spanish. The project was completed within a 3 week timeline, which was very demanding and rewarding for all parties involved. In order to meet this challenge, PLG had to make full use of our Translation Memory software to make the layout work and translations as efficient as possible. Also, project managers on both ends needed to be incredibly responsive, as any delays could seriously affect the deadline. The use of a cloud service to transfer files made data transfer seamless and effective. The project may have seemed daunting at first, but with constant communication between the PLG team, the Design Tower team, and the TableCraft team, the project flowed with utmost efficiency.

It was a pleasure to work with the TableCraft and Design Tower teams on this project. During our post-mortem meeting with TableCraft’s Director of Marketing and Marketing & Sales Coordinator, they said that our service was “simply amazing.” We can wholeheartedly say that we feel the same way about the experience in working with their team, and we look forward to supporting them in their future multilingual endeavors.

PLG Customer Satisfaction Survey- 30 Seconds of Your Time

Our top priority at Precision Language & Graphics is you, our client! In order to provide the best service, we have recently implemented the use of a short survey. You have the option to provide your name and/or company name, but as this is an optional question on the survey, it is otherwise anonymous.

By completing our customer satisfaction survey, our clients can let us know what we are doing well and what we can improve on. This is essential in optimizing our services for all our clients. Essentially, we can’t fix what we don’t know is broken. And in just 30 seconds, you can tell us how we can do better for you next time.

In one month’s time of using this survey, we have already received 5 reviews from satisfied clients. Their responses include:

Anonymous: “Excellent service and turnaround time.”

Anonymous: “You are all very kind, fast and responsible. We can depend on you to get our translations on time.”

Mass Z.: “Easy to work with PLG personnel. Products always on time and accurate.”

Joanna L.: “Quick, professional, polite.”

Cheryl B.: “Very responsive. Pricing competitive. Quick Turn Around… can’t ask for more!”

We greatly appreciate our clients taking the time to fill out our survey. This process will help us to make your translation experience as positive as possible.

If you have used PLG for a project, please take a moment to fill out our survey here. Thank you very much!

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