When doing business in today’s integration scenario, very frequently do entrepreneurs find themselves coping with language obstacle. For instance, a contract or a legal document needing translation. Do you intend to ultilise in house multilingual employees instead of hiring a translation company? In some certain situations, multilingual employees can give you the solution and save the company a little budget. However, it is highly recommended to hire a translation company to handle such projects. Wonder why? Here under are some reasons for this argument:
That a person is multilingual does not mean he/she can do the translation job well. There is a wrong assumption that anyone speaking two languages is able to translate between them. It takes much more than knowing a language to translate a document, especially with industry –specific or technical one. Indeed, a translator, besides having extensive study of both the source language and the target language, also need in-depth knowledge of the two cultures as well as lots of experience to precisely interpret from one language to another. It is very hard to find a non-professional translator with all of the above requirements.
Moreover, when giving the translation request to an employee without expertise, you are putting yourself into a potential risk. What if your employee submitted an inaccurate or poor translation to clients without notice? This can tremendously damage your entire company’s professional image or worse, lead your company into litigation, if the error is found in such documents related to legal matters or contract. Remember, an inaccurate translation is worthless. A translation company usually has a team of qualified and experienced translators plus the proofreading process that can guarantee much higher accuracy. Hence, this helps minimize the chances of unfortunate consequences.
In addition, partnership with a professional translation company can give you valuable advice for your project. For example, having cultural knowledge of the country using the target language, they can provide you some tips to localize your marketing materials in a foreign market.
Utilizing your in-house employee may be efficient in some cases, but it also comes with disadvantages. For instance, what if the person you need is unexpectedly unavailable at the required time? A professional translation agency can offer you a rich resource of qualified translators who have expertise in different languages and areas, while usually most of your employees are proficient in one specific language. In this partnership, you can just give the enquiry, and then the agency will select translators with the suitable knowledge to complete your request. This is critically important in big projects which involve multiple languages.
A translation company already has their working procedure in place while your company, to carry out an additional translation task, needs to set up a total new process. Take into account all the steps you will have to go through, including assigning staff with relevant knowledge and skills, communicating standards and requirements, researching the translation field, monitoring progress, proofreading again and again, etc. This may take an extremely tiring long time, let alone the worry of poor quality outcomes. Why not give the task to the professional, your staff can stay focus on what they are actually good at, and you will receive a much higher quality result on time.
One of the most important things a translation agency must own to run their business is translation memory. By reusing the content that matches the previous translation data, this system helps significantly minimize long-term costs. At the same time, it maintains the consistency of the terminologies for your future projects while creating a unique style and image for your company’s documents. Retaining this helpful system is very hard to manage in-house since it requires constant care and editing. Let the translation agency handle this investment for you instead.
Project management tools offered to you will also be far more advanced than what basic applications like MS Word or Excel can do. And in cases your employees or products change, without the proper management, inconsistency will be found. Customers can be confused or give negative reaction, in a possible circumstance whereby the same function or instruction is described in different ways. This will result in a huge loss of clients and/or decrease in sale. Outsourcing will help you avoid a lot of such potential risks.
Given all specializations a translation provider has, partnership will be much more effective and far less risky in the long term rather than trying to create your own tools and resources and manage the process in-house. Translation product will be delivered to you on time. And if you are not satisfied with the translation documents, their service will provide you unlimited editions until you completely accept the document. The process of proofreading and editing again and again already consumes an extreme amount of time if managed in house.
Hiring an external translation company might cost you a little bit money, but indeed save you a remarkable amount of efficiency. Instead of forcing your staff work on an out-of-scope task, release them from the task they are not familiar with and let them concentrate in what they are trained and experienced in. Efficiency cannot be guaranteed otherwise.