If you’re already a successful entrepreneur in your home country you may be considering taking your company abroad, because expanding in this way will provide your business with many amazing opportunities. One aspect of expanding internationally means that you’ll have a new target audience and, in order to speak to that audience, translations will be required.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that translation is a simple process, because it’s not! You need to be sure that you’re working with the very best, and that’s why you need to work with a professional translator. It’s the only way you can be assured of high quality, accuracy, consistency, and industry expertise, in addition to an efficient turnaround time.

In this post, we’ll share some translation tips with you so you’ll understand the process of purchasing translation services.

Have Your Target Audience in Mind When You Write Your Text

When you’re preparing copy for international clients, special attention must be paid to every word. Professional translators understand how important it is to maintain the same level and style of writing as in the source language. Colloquial expressions, plays on words, national contexts, and acronyms may look great in a brochure you’ve created for your own language, but when translated into another language they lose all impact.

Choose and Hire Your Translator in Advance

If you have a deadline and your translation will need to be printed, it’s important that you hire your translator as early as possible. Many people don’t understand that translating a document takes at least as long as writing the original work, and sometimes even longer. Please remember that translation does take time, and you certainly don’t want to sacrifice quality for quantity. If you know this translation will be a rush job you should warn your translator in advance and be aware that there will be a higher rate applied.

Don’t Use Machine Translations

At this point in time, machine translations cannot match the skills of a professional translator, and it's only human translators that can translate into a language that people will actually understand. Let’s face it, an automatic machine translation can’t possibly understand or interpret the nuances of language. Translations that are machine generated are great if you’re looking for a rough draft of something, but they’ll invariably provide a translation that’s full of mistakes: a translation that could well do more harm than good. When a translator delivers a translation that’s less than perfect, they’re implying that the client is not important.

How Translators Charge

You need to ask the translation agency or translator concerned whether they charge for project management, technology, setup, or rush work. Generally, translators charge by the word, and sometimes they charge by the hour, so you need to ask if these are the only rates they’ll be charging. Getting this sorted out right at the beginning helps avoid any unexpected drain on your budget.

You Get What You Pay for

As with other types of business, you need to be wary of providers charging very low rates, and with translators, this could be as low as 0.5 cents per word or one or two cents per word. At rates this low they may be skipping important aspects of the translation process. The problem with low-quality translations is that they’re eventually going to cost you a great deal of money and time fixing mistakes, and this additional cost will probably not be factored into your budget.