Save Money on Translation Services

Translation is generally paid per word, sometimes per page. The price per word depends on the difficulty of the text, the complexity of the layout and the deadline. Ultimately, the final price per word will depend on how many hours the translator or the translation company estimates he/she will have to work on the translation. Based on this, here are some tips for savings money on translation services.

• Use machine translator whenever possible: This may save you and/or your company a lot of money as this service is basically free. However, it should only be used for internal communication in the company, e.g. between members of a team to translate emails. All documents for official internal use and external use should be translated professionally by a human translator translating into his native language.

• Provide only the text you need to be translated: Try to stick to the point in your documents as much as possible. Avoid repetitions in your text or ask for a discount for repetition. All translation company will have software (e.g. Trados) to compute the number of words, repetitions and fuzzy matches (partial repetitions). 
  

• Avoid complex layouts: Unless you want your document to be formatted by the translation company, provide the text to be translated in a Microsoft Word file with little or no formatting. For example, if you have both Word and PDF version of a document, send the Microsoft Word file, you may have to pay less than for the PDF document.  The more you make the translator�s job eay so that he can focus on the translation rather than the document layout, the cheaper you�ll have to pay.

• Plan ahead: Try to get your document ready as soon as possible, so that you do not need to ask for the translation to be ready in a short time. Indeed, if you need to translate more than 2000 words a day, you may need to pay a rush charge. This will generally increase the price by 25 to 50%.

• Shop around: Try to find an affordable translation service you feel you can trust, by checking the yellow pages and searching on the internet.

• Test the translation service: Ask for a test or only give a small assignment the first time you use the translation company services. This will avoid taking the risk of having to retranslate a document, because the initial translation was not up to the required standard.

• Do not use the cheapest translators: Even though this may be tempting to use the cheapest translation service you can use, you may end up paying twice for your translation, if it needs to be redone. In many cases, very cheap translations are done by part-time freelancers and more often than not you may not receive the translation you ordered, the quality may be very poor or you may receive it after the deadline previously agreed. Of course, there may be exceptions, but you are without doubts taking unnecessary risks.

• Choose your payment mean: If you use a translation service in your own country or city, the cheapest ways to pay are cash or checks. However, if you work with a translation company in another country paying by cash will not be possible, paying by check will incur charges on both ends. In that case, from the customer point of view, credit card is the best way to pay, as all the fees will be borne by the translation company.  If the company does not have this option, you may ask them if they would accept receiving payment thru online payment services such as paypal or moneybookers so that you can pay by credit card. If this is not possible then you would have to pay by Western Union, international bank transfer or check that will most of the time require the client to pay fees.

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