Staying on Budget While Getting High-quality Translation Service is Possible: Here is How

What if we told you that you can get high-quality translation services supported by various technologies when you have a limited budget and make your company keep pace with global expansion?

Translation has become an essential component of businesses in any area that keeps expanding globally. Without a doubt, having a multi-language website serves you with a larger audience, improved conversion rates, an enhanced brand image, and even helps you rank higher on search engine result pages as you provide your customers with the information they need in their own language. To illustrate, a survey on the effect of website translation and localization conducted by CSA Research demonstrated that 40% of customers do not prefer to buy from websites that are in a foreign language and 65% prefer content in their native language. This, in fact, goes with translation in any area other than your website.

Everything seems logical and clear so far. Now comes the controversial and confusing part: with a vast amount of translation options ranging from hiring professional translators to utilizing machine translation and many others, how do you decide which option fulfills your quality demand the best while keeping your costs to a minimum? Let’s unleash some surprising facts and find answers to your questions along the way.

Understanding the pricing models: how are translation services charged?

We mentioned earlier that there are various options you can consult regarding translation services. We will now take a closer look at their pricing models to be able to decide which brings more value to your company.

1. Professional translators and translation agencies

The first thing that comes to mind when you are searching for a translation service is professional translators or translation agencies. These two options take into consideration two key factors when determining how much to charge:

• The language pair : the source language (the language your text is currently written in) and the target language (the language it needs to be translated into)-determines the cost of the translation. The less common the languages, the more costly the product. Let’s say you have two different texts to be translated. The first one needs to be translated from English to French, and the other one should be translated from Japanese to Arabic or Korean to Russian. Which one do you think will cost more? The answer is the second one. Several factors such as purchasing power level, economic situation of the countries, and import-export relationship play a role in shaping the translation costs between different language pairs. Less developed relationships may result in higher translation costs due to difficulties in finding qualified translators proficient in both languages.
• Text length : it goes without saying that as the number of words increases, so does the cost of your translation.

These are only the main factors that play a role in pricing. Below are other elements:

• Delivery date : quick turnaround projects are charged more because translators need to put much more effort and resources into their translation process to be able to meet tight deadlines. Translation companies can overcome this problem by assigning tasks to their team, enabling them to complete more high-quality translation projects within a limited period of time, compared to a single translator.
• The format of the source text : asking the translator to deliver the text in the same format as your original document may cost a lot more, as complex formats like scanned documents, images, audio, and video files that are not editable will take more time to translate and convert, as opposed to Word and Excel sheets.
• The qualities of the translator : it would not make any sense if a fresh translator charged the same amount as a professional translator who has years of field knowledge and experience, right?
• The topic of the translation : Because the translator must have a grasp on the technical terms and be able to translate them accurately, translating a technical item (like legal documents) will be more expensive compared to translating a generic text (such as a social media content about traveling to Europe that doesn’t include industry-specific terms).
• The number of revisions needed : more work equals more charging. As translators will need to deal with the extra work you assign them, they will most likely demand more for the services they provide.

As you can see, the translation process takes a good deal of time considering all the work that needs to be completed. Depending on your requirements for the translation, it takes more effort, which leads to an increased translation cost.

2. Machine translation tools like Google Translate

We know that it may be tempting to save a great deal of money by letting machine translation work its magic. Nowadays, more tools are emerging that allow you to translate high volumes of documents with the best quality and accuracy possible. Among these tools are Google Translate, Bing Microsoft Translator, Amazon Translate, and so many others. They are getting surprisingly accurate with the technological advancements. These machine translation tools seem to help you without any cost, but we need to give you a heads up at this point. Translations done by machine translation tools still need to be edited and reviewed by human translators to achieve high-quality translations for high-visibility content.

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Hareword offers a technology that enables companies to directly integrate machine translation into their content management systems (CMS). This service comes in handy especially when content quality expectations are not set relatively high such as short product descriptions and informal emails. Ready to save time and effort? Contact us today and explore our solution for a seamless translation process.

3. In-house support

If someone in your team has a grasp of the target language, the whole translation process can be cost-free. Yet, is it worth sacrificing the other responsibilities that person needs to undertake successfully? Let’s imagine a salesman working on a translation project for hours. Even if he used machine translation, he’d have to copy and paste the whole document manually while he could be closing the deals with new customers and bringing in money in the meantime.

More importantly, translation is not as easy as it is believed to be and requires both technical and cultural knowledge. For these very reasons, the final translated product may not be as yielding if done by someone who just speaks the target language but is not qualified as a translator.

4. Computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools

The costs totally depend on each CAT tool. While some tools allow you to try premium features for free for a limited time, others require monthly/yearly subscriptions. How do they work, then? CAT tools provide translators with a translation memory feature that retrieves previously translated content and speeds up the translation process.These tools save translators from the burden of quality and deadline problems they face when translations are done on Word or Excel by enabling them to work on a single platform.

The best translation solution

Working with freelance translators can be a feasible option for some but it may bring together some challenges, as only one person will be in charge of the entire translation process, and this could impact the quality. So, choosing translation agencies over freelancers can provide more benefits with the help of a team of professional translators that can boost scalability.

Using machine translation tools helps you save a lot of time and money, but at the same time, it still needs editing by human translators in order to obtain the highest-quality translation. It falls short in terms of cultural knowledge, contextualization, and register. So, machine translation is effective only when it is implemented by professionals.

In a nutshell, while using machine translation and doing the translation on your own may offer a cost-effective option, it lacks some skills that human translators have. Machine translation tools can yield better results when used by professionals. The next logical solution is to hire freelance translators; yet, relying on one person to complete the whole project may not guarantee you the quality you desire. So, the best solution is to work with translation agencies using high-performance technologies that help get the best-quality translations within a limited timeframe.

How do we stand out as Hareword?

We are a scaling translation and localization company using a variety of technologies that increase the efficiency of the translation process and decrease the cost.

Translation memory: you already have an idea what translation memory is. As Hareword, we charge only once if a segment in your text has already been translated and stored in our system. We also charge significantly less if there is at least 75% similarity with already translated segments. Translation memory also helps us provide our customers with quick turnaround times and lets us spend the necessary time on the quality of the text.

Quality assurance: our quality assurance tool automatically detects any errors and recommends revisions if needed. No matter which translation package you decide to purchase, we always run this tool to ensure the quality of your project.

AI-based translation: remember that we said machine translation helps minimize your costs and produce efficient translated content when mixed up with human expertise. This is what we do. By integrating artificial intelligence into our workflow, we can handle high volumes at a low cost and with a quick turnaround time.

Terminology management: we constantly keep your list up-to-date and work hand-in-hand with you while doing so, which means that you have control over our term list via our Customer Dashboard. Terminology management ensures consistency and accuracy, which are some of the key points in translation.

Brand style guide: just deliver us your briefings through our Style Guide interface and let us scale up your customer engagement.

With these technologies we implement efficiently, we are able to reduce your translation costs and still offer quality content for your business.

We do not charge differently depending on the subject matter of your text. Hareword offers one price for all.

Based on your needs and industry, we provide various translation packages with adjusted pricing to meet your needs.

Let’s boost your company together

Finding the best solution for your translation needs may be a daunting process when you have so many options but limited resources. Remember that artificial intelligence is now an indispensable component of the translation industry when backed up with human expertise. We bring together the power of technology and our professional translators’ high-level knowledge to provide you with quality translation while reducing your costs.

Interested in finding out more? Contact us or you can order yours now if you feel ready to leverage your company.