“I know where they translate cheap”

When you choose a translation agency or an individual translator, you should start from asking yourself what the desired quality of your translation should be. If you look for quality, a good translation cannot cost below some fixed sum. At present moment there is a lower price limit for a translation and if you decide to go for the lowest price possible, you are risking the quality.

For example, if the price for translation to the most popular languages (English, German, French) is below 5-7 USD per page, there is a great risk that you are throwing your money to the winds. That is why professional agencies that are not new to the market set the prices that guarantee an acceptable quality of the translations. That means that for your money you get an adequate translation without distortion of a meaning, grammatical, lexical and stylistic mistakes.

You should always understand that the higher the price for the translation, the more qualified and expensive translators will be engaged in performing your task – which means the higher quality of your translation.

Of course, there is some “span” even between the works of “guaranteed quality” – there are works that are done better or worse, brilliantly of just on a good level. But all of these translations meet the criteria of adequacy and equivalency. Do not sacrifice the quality!

“I know where they translate very fast”

Another important criterion that is important for the translation is the time of its performance. One should keep in remember that translation is a creative process and you can’t significantly change its time of performance without sacrificing the quality, even for really big money.

That’s why (if you have extremely strict deadline for a great volume of text for translation), you’d better give this job to professionals that are long active and successful on the market. Our translation agency works with the best translators available, they can help you choose the optimal translation time and provide the operational efficiency you seek.

If most of the experienced and trusted translation agencies told you that it is impossible to perform your task in such insufficient time span and you found a company that claims that they’ll do it, take your time before you decide to deal with them. Learn the objective reasons that make this task impossible for most other agencies and then ask the company that agreed to perform the urgent translation, how they are going to overcome these obstacles.

Most often they either do it with inappropriate quality or just overrate their abilities, which lead to wrecking of your order. Or even worse: the quality of the translation is inadequate and after the client makes claims it takes as much time to overdo the job. Don’t do it in a hurry if there are no objective reasons for that!

“Our employee knows the language and always evaluates the quality of any translation himself”

Sometimes translators face the following phenomenon: some clients unreasonably consider that the employees of their company know the language at a level that allows them to make free-and-easy judgments about the quality of the executed translation. Unfortunately, it leads to corrections that not only make the text worse, but often distort its meaning. That’s why we strongly recommend our clients to refrain from altering the translation, if they are not absolutely sure that they are valid.

“We’d better hire a staff translator and do the job with our own resources”

When the company has to translate a great volume of texts, it can decide to introduce the position of a staff translator. Unfortunately, companies do not always consider the companion problems, which prevent them from improving the current situation and even leads to further unnecessary costs.

The reason for this is that most translators specialize in few “narrow” fields, so it is virtually impossible to maintain a good quality of translation in various fields of knowledge, having only one translator at hand. It is hard to estimate the quality of translations too, because partners (especially foreign partners) prefer to keep their opinions about the quality of translation to themselves.

No translator can see all of his own mistakes or make a detailed misprint check. Translator is human and human factor should be considered – a lot of mistakes are made not due to ignorance of the translator in a specific field, but due to common inattention.

In a professional translation agency the translation is done by a specialized translator and is checked by a proof-reader, which reduces the probability of errors. It must be also noted that work-load for translators is not always stable in companies. That means that the staff translator may have nothing to do on one day and snowed under requests the other day, unable to do it all on time.