A guide to buying
translation
For non-linguists, buying translations can be frustrating. This guide is
aimed at reducing stress and helping you get the most out of your translation
budget. Click here to download this guide (PDF) from the American
Translators Association.
Big companies that use translations regularly know what the job
involves, and know what to look for. Depending on your needs and the size of
your business, you may need the help of a larger translation agency that can
handle several languages or big amounts of words. But if you are a medium or
small business and have a limited budget, in the guide mentioned above you can
find tips to prepare your text for translation. These are things like: choosing
what to translate, formatting your documents so it the translator does not have
to convert or re-format the material.
***
Intelligent Quality
“...Air France (…) sought—in a
fiercely competitive industry—to promote a special bring-along-the-spouse offer
under the extraordinary slogan: ‘Air France Wants You to Fly United.’ ”
(quote from Translation Journal)
Mistranslations or translations that
do not take the cultural context into account won’t get your message across in
the best of the cases. At their worst, they can hurt your business, as in the
example above.
***
Support quotes from peers about the
business side of it all
«Never
offer volume discounts because
these projects simply tie you up when you could be working for higher rates,
looking for other work or enjoying your free time, which you should value. It
merely means you will be working for a substandard rate for longer.»
«Each time a
client asks a translator to “make a gesture of goodwill” he or she is asking
that person to forego a part of his or her life. That’s not business, it’s
blackmail.»
When agencies try to push our fees
down, we can send this video over:
No comments:
Post a Comment