There are many good reasons to entrust your translation projects to a professional translation agency. For one thing, you can save on expensive internal resources by not having to ask your marketing employees or engineers to spend time translating texts.
After all, your employees are not necessarily natural wordsmiths, and seemingly small grammatical mishaps can lead to serious misinterpretations which you’ll want to avoid, especially in your sales terms or product manuals. In the worst case, mistakes could have negative legal or financial consequences for your company.
Even though your content may seem simple on the surface, the importance of clear and captivating text is not to be underestimated.
And that is precisely what translators are specialists in.
What makes a good translation?
A professional translation is one completed by a qualified translator who masters their working languages and their mother tongue to a very high level in terms of convention, style and flair. Professional translators always translate exclusively into their native language in order to guarantee a flawless and natural-sounding text. This means that a native Dane who has studied English would still only translate from English into Danish and never the other way round.
Moreover, most professional translators will also have one or more areas of expertise such as medicine, law, marketing or finance, for example.
To put it simply, a good translation is one where the reader forgets or does not realise they are reading a translated text.
Checklist when choosing a translation agency
We have compiled a list of factors that you might want to consider checking before entering into a cooperation agreement.
- Specialisation: What language combinations and specialist areas can the agency cover (medicine, IT, legal, marketing, etc)?
- Delivery times: What kind of timescales does the agency offer? Can they provide urgent translations when necessary?
- Communication: Is the agency going to assign you a designated contact person? Will you be able to communicate with the project manager in your own native language?
- Services: Will the agency be able to offer other services such as the SEO optimisation of website texts, the graphic adaptation of texts, copywriting or website testing?
- Production: Does the agency have its own in-house translators and a steady working relationship with its own freelancers, or do they outsource translation tasks to other agencies? Can the agency offer a specially selected team of translators for each client?
- Quality assurance: Are translators regularly evaluated on the quality of their translations? Is the proofreading step internal or external? Are the translation and proofreading steps done by the same person? Or is there a separate proofreader?
- Use of CAT tools: Does the agency use professional translation tools to guarantee uniform translations and an effective workflow? Who owns the rights to the translation memory (TM): the customer (you) or the supplier (the translation agency)?
- Use of terminology databases: Is it possible to create term bases so that translators will always be able to access correct or preferred industry terms?
- Prices/quotes: What does the price include? Are you paying for a translation from one translator or a translation and proofreading process that uses two different linguists? Are discounts offered on large-volume projects? Do you get discounts for repeated text in your files? Can you choose machine translation for certain text types where quality requirements might not be quite so high? Is project management included in the price? Are quality checks performed before delivery?
Proofreading is the key to a great translation
There are many ways to ensure translation quality.
Professional translation tools have special features for quality assurance which review the text for spelling mistakes, syntax and grammatical errors and inconsistencies.
Besides using these tools, it is also important to ensure the text is subjected to a thorough proofreading process by a second linguist. When selecting an agency, it is therefore a good idea to ask whether proofreading is performed by the same linguist who translates the text or by a separate proofreader.
Be aware that some agencies do not include proofreading in the price for translation, so make sure you know exactly what steps and services are included in your quote, especially when comparing with other agencies. The cheapest price on first glance may actually turn out to be the most expensive.
Best of luck, no matter what agency you choose! You are always welcome to contact us if you need help with a translation project.