If you sell goods and services not only in Bulgaria, but also abroad, you will need a professional translation agency for sure. Undoubtedly, you are considering assigning the translations to an employee who (in their own words) knows the language very well and masters Microsoft Word. They can even make Excel spreadsheets! This may be an attractive solution; it will save you money, it will keep the employee busy…
Think twice!
Building a long-term relationship with a translation agency will not only guarantee you quality professional services; it will also protect you from certain traps that your in-house employee won’t be able to avoid. The professional translation agency will give you advantage over your competitors. Here’s why:
1. Experience
Partnership with a professional translation agency will give you valuable access to specialists with sound experience, specialists who have worked with companies similar to yours, closer to your project and, more specifically, specialists who speak your customers’ language!
The agency could give you priceless advice in all possible areas: from organization of translation work to help in localizing advertising materials aimed at foreign markets.
2. Resources
Many companies who once decided to manage the translation services by themselves are sooner or later faced with a growing amount of work that their employees cannot complete with the required quality. Especially, if that work was assigned to younger employees of insufficient experience and motivation. You start failing deadlines, errors in translations dramatically multiply… That happens frequently and leads to losses for the company.
Meanwhile, translation agencies use large teams of specialist linguists having the knowledge and experience required to work on your project. That will save you a lot of worries, often a lot of money, and you will not risk your project’s success. Just because the work done for you will be of high quality and will be delivered on time.
3. Tools
A professional agency uses project management tools. The benefits of those tools are far more than the features Word and Excel can boast.
When it comes to translations, one of the first and most important steps each company needs to make is to create translation memory. Using translation memory will help you minimize long-term costs. When you use it, each project is first scanned for matches and, if found, that matched content is reused. This does more than just to save money. It helps you to create style and image for your company content, as well as to maintain the consistency of the terminology you use.
Managing translations and translation memory involves constant care and editing. That’s the only way their efficiency can be guaranteed. Those processes are hard to do in-house. The professional agency will do that for you, so you won’t need to invest in additional tools or resources.
Another service that is more often discussed these days is machine translation. Of course, individual machine translation will be cheaper than using a translator, but the process needs to be monitored by a professional post-editor.
Machine translation could save up to 30% of translation costs for large projects, all the while ensuring that translations are made faster and that the project is finished sooner.
4. Consistency
The disadvantages of managing translations in-house are far more numerous than the benefits. One of the most serious problems in that case is maintaining linguistic consistency. If employees often change and products change as well, how can you be sure of the consistency?
Language used inconsistently may be a sign of grave negligence and it could confuse your customers. Do not make the mistake of describing the same function in different ways. Your customers are used to a certain terminology and style; when those change, their reaction might be negative. You realize that inconsistencies may lead to significant loss of clients and decrease in sales, don’t you? In favour of the competitor product or service, naturally.
The solution to this problem is a translation service according to the standards that only a professional language service provider could offer you. Using a list of set terms, creating a glossary, defining the style and language communication, as well as the general coherence of your multilingual content are all of crucial importance to your business. Your officer is not capable of performing such a functional and professional approach, not only because that would take more time and will cost more. Outsourcing those services to a language provider makes sense not only from a professional and functional point of view, but also because it would free up time for one of your employees. That employee of yours will be able to manage the working hours more effectively and to do the work for which he or she is qualified and experienced.
5. Effectiveness
Partnering with a professional language service provider to manage the translation and localization of your projects is much more effective and less risky in the long term than trying to create tools and resources, and to manage the work processes in-house.
Just think about it for a moment: What is more important for your business: that the team focus on creating a new work organization not typical for the company – in this case translation management – or that they fully concentrate on increasing your market share through approaches and techniques they are trained and experienced in?
Тhrough the involvement of а professional translation agency there is minimum risk, initial investments are less, and the work process is much more flexible.
Unlike your sales team, who are most probably managing your in-house translations, the professional translators could guarantee you quality work done quickly. Your sales team have their other tasks that require time and commitment.
Managing the technologies a translation company uses is just as crucial. Agencies update their tools and improve their processes, and that will save you time and money.
It’s obvious that hiring a translation and localization provider is undoubtedly to your benefit. However, if you hesitate or have questions, please contact us. We will advise you if you are searching for a translation agency for the first time, or if you are considering changing such. And we will be professional and completely unbiased. You can be sure of that!