Save Money on Translation Services
Translation is generally paid per word, sometimes
per page.
The price per word depends on the difficulty of the text, the
complexity of the
layout and the deadline. Ultimately, the
final price per word will depend on how many hours the translator or
the translation
company estimates he/she will have to work on the translation. Based on
this,
here are some tips for savings money on translation services.
-
Use machine translator
whenever possible:
This may save you and/or your company a lot of money as this
service is
basically free. However, it should only be used for internal
communication in
the company, e.g. between members of a team to translate emails. All
documents
for official internal use and external use should be translated
professionally by
a human translator translating into his native language.
-
Provide only the text you
need to be
translated: Try to stick to the point in your documents as much
as
possible. Avoid repetitions in your text or ask for a discount for
repetition.
All translation company will have software (e.g. Trados) to compute the
number
of words, repetitions and fuzzy matches (partial repetitions).
-
Avoid complex layouts:
Unless you
want your document to be formatted by the translation company, provide
the text
to be translated in a Microsoft Word file with little or no formatting.
For
example, if you have both Word and PDF version of a document, send the
Microsoft
Word file, you may have to pay less than for the PDF document. The more you make the translator’s job eay so
that he can focus on the translation rather than the document layout,
the
cheaper you’ll have to pay.
-
Plan ahead: Try to
get your
document ready as soon as possible, so that you do not need to ask for
the
translation to be ready in a short time. Indeed, if you need to
translate more
than 2000 words a day, you may need to pay a rush charge. This will
generally
increase the price by 25 to 50%.
-
Shop around: Try
to find an
affordable translation service you feel you can trust, by checking the
yellow
pages and searching on the internet.
-
Test the translation
service: Ask
for a test or only give a small assignment the first time you use the
translation
company services. This will avoid taking the risk of having to
retranslate a
document, because the initial translation was not up to the required
standard.
-
Do not use the cheapest
translators:
Even though this may be tempting to use the cheapest translation
service you
can use, you may end up paying twice for your translation, if it needs
to be
redone. In many cases, very cheap translations are done by part-time
freelancers
and more often than not you may not receive the translation you
ordered, the
quality may be very poor or you may receive it after the deadline
previously
agreed. Of course, there may be exceptions, but you are without doubts
taking unnecessary
risks.
- Choose
your payment
mean: If you use a
translation service in your own country or city, the cheapest ways to
pay are
cash or checks. However, if you work with a translation company in
another
country paying by cash will not be possible, paying by check will incur
charges
on both ends. In that case, from the customer point of view, credit
card is the
best way to pay, as all the fees will be borne by the translation
company. If the company does not have this option,
you may ask them if they would accept receiving payment thru online
payment
services such as paypal or moneybookers so that you can pay by credit
card. If
this is not possible then you would have to pay by Western Union,
international
bank transfer or check that will most of the time require the client to
pay
fees.
For those of you looking for a currency convertor: