The Questions You Must Ask Before Signing with a Translation Services Agency

Since you have spent countless hours creating the perfect portfolio, from your business cards to your documents, to your web site, you decide to go a step further and choose to have your most important work translated in one or all the European languages or in an Asian language. For you the quickest way to find a translation services agency is to turn to Google. Little did you know that what appears in front of you is one of the biggest challenges you will face. Google will give you more than 3,600,000 choices under translation services and if you type a specific target language such as French translation services, you will have about the same numbers of returns than before, and for Spanish translation services, you will get around 2,800,000 hits.

Since you are a very busy person, you know that you cannot possibly look into each agency or make a list for comparison. So you look at the top five and they all start to blend in. They are all providing the same services, so you think! They might provide a service which is to translate your documents but they do not provide the same quality or the same level of translations. How is this possible? Lets look into this from another point of view. Did you hire your legal or your financial counsel because they ranked on the top of a Google page? I hope not! How about your family doctor? Probably not! You did your research, called and had your questions answered. Translation services agencies should be treated exactly the same way than your legal or your financial counsel.

In order to do so you must ask the following questions:

What is the agencys area of specialization? Not everyone knows everything! Do they specialize in marketing, legal, computers, medical, finance, technical, etc? It is important to know their specialty field because each field has its own language, for example fashion terms are different than technical or legal. Even the way of writing the sentences are different.

After the translation is done, do they have an editor looking over the work? This will avoid mistakes, misspellings, etc.

Is the translator someone who learned the language or a native speaker? The agency must have a native speaker or your translation will not be accurate. Each language has its own set of words and a language evolves. The words we might have used 3 years ago might be different now.

Can you ask questions to the translator or the project manager? This is a must as sometimes the project scope or dateline can change.

Do they have a specialized language database? This can expedite the translation.

In what format will your document be returned? Words, Excel, PDF, HTML?

How do they insure that the privacy of your document is kept secret? You do not want your trade secrets to be open to everyone.

You must see a sample of their work. If they refuse to give you a sample, then they are not professional. Choose a sample that will reflect your final document.

How long is this going to take? It depends on the document and on the translator. Most can translate 1500 words in one business day.

What will I have to pay? The cost depends on many factors such as the complexity, the length, the format and the dateline. Agencies can charge different fees based on words, pages, hours, and projects. Make sure you are giving details about your project and send some paragraphs of your document to give the agencies an idea of what you are talking about. Now, you probably want to have everything done in the cheapest way possible. But do understand that quality needs to be more important than the rates. Even though a cheaper price can give you the illusion of getting a deal; in reality this is not true.

When it comes to have your portfolios translated, ask questions, view a sample and choose based on the answers, flexibility, dateline and a competitive rate.