The world is getting smaller and barriers such as language, geographical distance and borders are now becoming less of a challenge when it comes to communication. To enable business relationships and clear communication, companies need to know the advantages of using good translation services and how to use them to their advantage. If a small or medium-sized business wants to grow and enter new markets, they must be be able to communicate with potential clients in a way that influences their buying decision.
When it comes to hiring a good translation service provider, it’s essential to approach them with an accurate analysis of what is required by your business. If the task at hand involves one small text translation, then it would make sense to hire an individual. However, if we are talking about translating something that is on a much more extensive level, then it’s important to hire the right business; one who will be able to establish your brand in that geographical market. When looking at truly professional translation services, there are a number of options to consider.
Learn more: Machine Translation Post-Editing (MTPE)
Will you be needing automated or machine translation, or will you be requiring high quality translation by human translators? This decision will be based on the amount, speed, intended use, and the type of material that you need to translate. Machine translations are fairly sophisticated these days and can work on your documents in a matter of seconds. They will compare your document with others and select the most likely string of words (or n-grams) in a sentence as opposed to using grammar rules to translate. The previous method is called rule-based machine translation and it was fairly accurate for related languages, although the newer methods, statistical machine translation and now neural machine translation, are much better. Obviously, machine translation is not for serious publication sand funny mistakes can be made.
Translation mistakes - Would you eat cooked lions everybody days? Machine translation technology is much more cost effective than hiring a human to work if you need fast translations, but you need to consider customization costs so that is can be trained with your own terminology. Otherwise, you will plug in to general, data-sucking services like Bing Translator or Google Translate which were designed for information purposes and not as a reliable, good translation service.
Learn more: 7 Tips for Good Translation Quality Control
It is important to determine which translation company is most suitable for your business when it comes to both cost and accuracy, as many specialize in a particular language (Spanish translation, Japanese translation, etc.) or field (like translation for the pharmaceutical industry, translation for the automotive industry, legal translation, etc.). Always ask for the human resources policy and how the translation company recruits their translators. Do they pass a test? How do they check their skills? Do they have proofreading services in place? This is a good way to ensure you are in the hands of a good translation provider. Spanish version of this article.