What do you actually pay for when you engage the services of a professional translator?
- Years of experience in translating documents and content in their particular specialist fields.
- The ability to directly leverage your company’s specific terminology (glossaries) and legacy documentation and content to prepare flawless translations of new material.
- A database (translation memory) is built up containing all your translations to ensure the consistent usage of your terminology and content. Such translation memories naturally also recognise material that has been used on previous occasions and insert it automatically into new translations. This also means that you do not have to pay for translations of existing content.
- The professional translator can pinpoint (potential) errors in your original content and bring them to your attention.
- Terms and words frequently have to be translated differently depending upon the specific context or sector. The translator knows this and uses the correct translation in each respective situation.
- Different sectors require differing writing styles, which can be reliably applied by the professional translator. It may be stylistically more appropriate, for instance, to use the present tense in the translation instead of the past tense found in the source text. Or it may better to split up or merge sentences, or even leave them out altogether. Such stylistic decisions cannot be made by machine translation or AI tools.
- The professional translator can perfectly adapt the layout of your documentation to accommodate the translated texts, which frequently will be of varying length compared to the original wording.
- In support of the translation process, translation memories can be created based on official multilingual online resources that relate directly to your industry, such as publicly available European directives.
- With the professional translator, you always have a personal point of contact for detailed questions regarding your translations.
Leave translating to professional translators!
Many project managers think that they can cut costs by giving a text that has been translated in-house to a translator, who then “just needs to check it and make a few corrections”.
If top quality is required, this is absolutely the wrong approach!
Our experience has shown that:
- In 5 out of every 10 cases, the product of this method is, to put it bluntly, only fit for the waste bin.
- In 7 out of every 10 cases, it would have been cheaper and quicker to have the text translated from scratch by a professional translator than to have the in-house translation proof-read and corrected. The client does not save any time or money, as the employee charged with the translation – irrespective of how long he may have spent abroad –needs many more (naturally paid) hours to translate the text into what is, for him, a foreign language, than does the experienced translator translating into his native language. Answering the frequent enquiries from the translator is also a much more time-consuming exercise than would appear at first glance.
- In 10 out of 10 cases, it is necessary to edit and correct the translation to a varying degree.
Translators are a waste of space…
Food for thought:
Uploaded on 01.09.2013. Reversible text. Written and performed by Erik Skuggevik for The Norwegian Association of Literary Translators. Produced by Iver Grimstad.