Beth Worthy
6/19/2020
Want to localize your company’s content with a foreign audience? If so, translation is the best route to take. Content translation can help your firm break into new markets and communicate your message to non-English speaking audiences.
Should you hire an in-house translator or find a professional translation services company to do the work for you?
Hiring an in-house translator can help keep your costs down. You may seem like you’re saving money by having one of your employees translate the company content.
However, the true cost of your project will provide evidence from the results that you will receive. To start off, the employee may not be a native speaker of the target language your audience understands. Remember, just because someone is bilingual does not mean he or she can accurately translate content from one language to another.
Translation is a complex skill that is best left to professionals. Understanding the cultural aspects of both the source and target languages are critical in order to deliver accurate messages.
Intricate language nuances, grammar rules, and slang can be difficult for a non-native speaker to understand and translate correctly. Couple this with specific industry jargon, and you’ll end up with a weak attempt of content translation that would seem to have been generated by the software.
Remember, translation is more about context than a simple replacement of vocabulary from one language to another.
Artificial Intelligent (AI) technology can help provide a rough draft translation. However, for the information to be well-formatted and understood, a professional translator (human) has to go through it.
Also Read: Challenges Companies Face While Organizing E-Learning Translation Projects
The scale of your project should help you determine whether to hire a professional translation company or a freelancer.
Small businesses with one-time projects may find working with freelance translators easier and cost-effective. Most freelancers are very efficient and typically have simple working terms. You can find freelance translators from talent marketplaces such as Upwork and Fiverr.
However, if you’ll regularly need your projects translated, hiring a translation company rather than a freelancer would be beneficial.
Professional translation companies have teams of trained professionals with many years of experience in translating different types of content into various languages.
Need your videos translated for the Spanish market? There’s a team for that.
How about that video ad that you wanted to reach the German market with? The company has you covered.
Being a native speaker does not make one a professional translator. Therefore, resist the temptation of assigning translation work to one of your employees. Otherwise, you may have to deal with long turn-around-time, inconsistent messaging, and inaccurate translations.
When you hire a professional translation company, you get instant access to a wide pool of talented translators. These translators know the industry well, work with specific tools of the trade, and are part of a team of managers, editors, and other stakeholders that are focused on ensuring the success of your project.
One of the problems of letting your bilingual secretary translate your company content is that you really don’t know what you are getting.
When someone is bilingual, how can you gauge their proficiency in the target language when you don’t speak it fluently? How can you be sure of getting accurate content from them?
As a business, you want to build your brand and endear audiences to it. This means presenting your content in a way that resonates with your target audience. Apart from this, any translated works should be accurate. You don’t want to use Google Translate for translation; the results will be gibberish and can taint your brand.
Working with a translation company is a sure way of getting accurate translations.
Here are some steps that the translation companies take to make your project a success.
There is so much that goes into a translation project to make it a success. For example, the typical document translation work involves reviewing the content to be translated, understanding the mannerisms and cultural intricacies of the target audience, determining the right words to use that will evoke the emotions desired, formatting, and so on.
An in-house translator may not have the resources or skills required to produce a quality translation. On the other hand, a translation company has all the tools and infrastructure to make your project a success.
In a nutshell, if you do not need content translated on a regular basis, investing in the translation tools will cut into your profits. Moreover, it will take time to train an in-house translator to use the tools perfectly.
By working with a translation company, you save time that you would have otherwise used to translate content in-house and the cost of investing in translation tools and infrastructure.
If you are implementing translation as part of your marketing strategy, you need to keep tabs of how the audience will react to your translated content. Get translation wrong, and your brand reputation can quickly fall, making it impossible to make headway in the new markets that you are targeting.
Translating a small amount of content can be done in-house. However, when all of your content has to be translated as part of a growth strategy, you want to be sure it will resonate with your target audience. This makes consistency important in translation.
A professional translation company is well-equipped to handle your translation projects at scale. The firm not only has experienced translators but also the right tools and in-house quality assurance procedures mean to ensure consistent, accurate, and quality translations.
You can rely on a translation company to get your content ready for your target market within a few days before launch. Some companies can even translate your content in hours, thanks to their large distributed teams.
Translation is a core strategy for growing your business in foreign markets. When done right, you can acquire new customers at a low cost, build your brand, and improve your bottom-line.
Businesses that are eager to explore new markets can rely on professional translation services company for accurate and consistent translated content. These experienced companies have qualified translators that are not only bilingual but also native speakers of the target languages.
The above are some reasons why you should hire a professional translation company.
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