5 benefits of outsourcing your translation to a professional translator
Expanding your business into new markets requires accurate translations. Five benefits that will make you seriously consider hiring a professional translator.
You save invaluable time
You surely have heard the cliché saying “time is money”, but few people take this to heart, unjustly so. Imagine coding an encrypted screen recorder that you plan to commercialise in the coming months. You are working at capacity, chugging Red Bull after Red Bull, putting in 20-hour-work days, with no guarantee your product will find a buyer or regular subscriber. To add insult to injury you haven’t factored in that Ongota is likely not the language spoken by your main buyer group that sits in Germany or the United States. Since you don’t want to spend the extra buck, you decide to take matters into your own hands and invest another
60 hours in cobbling together a mediocrely translated website in English, likely costing you foregone revenue and time better spent on putting your product to the acid test. Instead you could hire a translator who will do the job in a fraction of the time, freeing up time better spent on the product itself.
More money in the bank
But wait, translators are expensive, no?!! Without a doubt, a quality translation is an investment, and a good translation will surely cost you. It is not uncommon for translators to charge you per line, page or character, which adds up. That said, many translators are also open to charging a lump sum for a project, especially if they sense you might be a recurring customer or s startup with a tightly calculated budget. Expect your translation tally for a website to, at the very least, be in the high three digits, and that is if you find a good self-respecting translator. Even if you were to pay an amount in the four digits, which may sound like a lot, it is a bargain compared to having a translator on payroll, unless you operate a sweatshop.
Finally, an outsourced translation may not only save you money, but in fact make you money. Especially a translator that is experienced in translating marketing collateral and branding material, will not blindly translate your text into the respective destination language. Instead, she will ensure that the text captivates your foreign audience in ways the source language does. A skilled translator can therefore also be thought of as a copywriter, except that she doesn’t create content from scratch, but uses the content provided to speak your customer’s language, whether it’s formal, casual or jovial.
Quality – This point is key
Don’t get me wrong, there are a whole lot of folk out there that are highly capable of writing in a language other than their own mother tongue. Often enough, they also do a decent job translating material using AI-powered online tools that are pushing the envelope in terms of detecting idioms and other linguistic nuances. Much like a human, these systems– while fast, mostly free and reasonably accurate– are not infallible, not by a long shot, and should only be consulted for private purposes or for situations where the stakes are low. At the very least have your outward-facing communication checked by a skilled translator.
Context is everything
Unlike humans, online translation tools are still struggling to gauge the context, resulting in unintelligible and out-of-context phrases. At best, a native speaker reading your self-translated content will brush off mistakes if he gets the gist of what the author was trying to say or what he came for, at worst, this can lead to a PR disaster, since something innocent in your own language may mean something inappropriate in another language. Save your PR department the damage-control work and pay someone to get it right from the start.
Have someones speak the language that is unique to your field
Specialised fields such as law and engineering are particularly susceptible to translation errors, as these fields often use a set of words not commonly known, sometimes not even to professional translators. It is not uncommon for online translation tools to provide a literal translation or an approximate translation. So if you are planning to introduce your new device and its operating instructions to a foreign market, do yourself a favour, hire a reputable translator that is ideally specialised in that area. While it's not always possible to find a specialised translator for the area you are looking for, a reputable translator will put in the research and is likely able to grasp the context fairly quickly, resulting in a translation that meets your needs. After all, you don’t want your customer service to be overwhelmed with an onslaught of avoidable requests.
In sum, there is definitely an upfront cost to hiring a translator, but it's an investment that will pay dividends, especially if you are reliant on outward-facing communication. If money is truly tight, at least consider hiring a translator to proofread your translation. That way you can rule out grave mistakes.
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