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.
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