Choosing the right translation company for your technical authoring projects

When you need to get your content translated into other languages, the translation industry can look like a big, scary, complicated world, even more so when it is for your Technical Authoring projects. But it doesn’t have to be a traumatic experience! Let us break down the process step by step for you. We promise that once you get familiar with the translation world, you will feel a lot more confident when looking for a company that meets your criteria and needs.

The first thing to consider is whether you’ll need translation services in the future. Will there be a regular flow of work? Finding a company that will translate your documents only once and on a regular basis are two different things. Before deciding on a company, you need to decide on your strategy. If you choose a company that you can work with regularly, even if you don’t see any projects in the future, it can save you both time and money. Once you have another project that needs to be translated, having a company you can work with again will ensure consistency in translation, and as a result a better quality. 

Let’s look at what advantages using a translation company can provide for you:

This way you won’t have to search for translators yourself or keep track of their every move in order to get status updates. Particularly beneficial when dealing with multiple languages and providers!

Which tools do justice to your content’s translation and will provide the fastest possible results? A translation company will be able to provide the answers

How do they decide this?

Some languages can be subject to regional differences, for instance a Canadian French translator will produce a much different output than a European French translator. Your content’s translation needs to fit your target audience and a translation company will be fully aware of this and will choose the right translator for the job.

Aside from regional variations, each translator specialises in certain subject areas and will not be suitable for projects that are out of their scope of specialty. One may be an expert on legal texts while the other can be an expert on technical manuals. Companies know both their translators’ language repertoire and their specialities and can assign the best fit according to your project’s needs.

Technical documentation tools like Paligo allow you to export and import translations in Xliff and other formats easily, that comes handy as an Xliff format is widely used file type that is compatible with many CAT tools. Many translation agencies will offer DTP solutions as well. One more less thing for you to deal with yourself!

Outstanding technological developments and innovations in IT have impacted the translation industry tremendously. Now every project can benefit from translation memory and term base usage. A Translation Memory (TM) is a database that contains all previously translated data while a Term Base (TB) is a database that contains commonly used specialist terms along with the appropriate translation. Both of these databases are updated with each new project. While this technology allows companies to translate projects faster, as the need to translate words/sentences that are already translated is eradicated, it also lowers the cost of the translation service. By using TMs and TBs, companies also ensure that sentences and terms in each document and project have a consistent translation.

While choosing a provider, one of the most important things is the translation company’s structure. The structure of the company is what determines if they can handle your project properly or not. There are many types of companies. But we can mainly categorize vendors under two headings: Outsourced and Inhouse. Outsourced companies are project-based providers. A team of project managers will be tasked to assign projects to freelance translators, these freelancers are external partners of the company. In professional translation companies, freelance translators would have been tried and tested and would have worked with them over a period. So, outsourced companies do not need to employ in-house translators other than project managers. Project managers are responsible for quality assurance of the output, forming a team of translators, overseeing the whole process, and successful delivery of the project on time. Inhouse vendors, on the other hand, have limited resources for big projects. Most of the time, they are limited to the translators they employ in-house, thus offering a limited number of language pairs. Some companies employ in-house translators and freelance translators at the same time.

Outsourced companies;

With inhouse vendors;

Whether you opt for an outsourcing company or a company with inhouse translators depends on the scope of your project.

When the company has expertise in the tools you use for technical documentation, it means that:

Once you decide on what services you need, the volume of the translation, the type of company, and what qualifications you need in a vendor; then you can start researching the market for the right provider. Referrals from a trusted source are a great way to find a provider as well as attending fairs and tradeshows. Another great tool you can use to find the one is the Internet. Read customer reviews, dig into the company’s website, check their blog articles and case studies. This can give you an indication about whether the company is the right fit for you or not. 

Here is a list of questions you can use as a checklist on your search:

After doing some research you will have a list of potential vendors. The best way to eliminate them and narrow down the list is by getting in touch with them. The way they communicate with you and how quickly they respond may help you determine which companies you can see yourself working with and those you can’t. Ask for more information, this way you get to see if the company is willing to provide you with more information and answer your questions, this can be the early indicator of a great language solution partner. One of the first things to pay attention to in this process is the team that you will work on your projects.

Learn as much detail as possible:

If you are considering choosing one company out of several with whom to place your work, keep records of the information you gather for each company, so that you can make comparisons to determine who ticks your boxes.

From our experience we are often requested to provide top quality translations, very quickly but very cheaply. Unfortunately to achieve all three expectations is extremely unrealistic – quick, top quality turnarounds come at a price and on the other hand, quick, cheap translations will lead to a compromise of quality! Make sure you know what your priorities are.

The content is translated by a qualified professional linguist and he/she is required to check the translation’s accuracy before delivery. After the translation is finished, it is also subjected to a Quality Assurance process by the project managers.

The content is translated by a qualified professional linguist, and revised by an equally qualified independent professional linguist. In the review stage, the changes are checked and approved by the original linguist, and checked for Quality Assurance by project managers. As these extra steps require more time and more people working on the project, this will naturally affect the cost. Every translation company names these processes according to the standards they follow, so you can come across review and proofreading or TEP (translation + editing + proofreading) instead of revision and review.

For your content to be understood by your target audience, you might need to ask for localisation instead of translation. Different from translation, while a text is being localised cultural differences are taken into consideration and your references and content are adapted into the target culture.

If the company has its own project management system/portal and you plan to keep working with the company in the upcoming projects, there may be a one-time fee initially to set up their systems.

If your project requires a time-consuming amount of formatting this also can be charged additionally by companies.

As there are fewer qualified translators for rare language pairs, finding an available translator is harder and their price can be higher than other language pair translators. This factor can drive up the cost.

Before choosing a translation company, you need to:

Your to-do list

Now you know everything you need to take into consideration while choosing a translation company for your technical documentation projects. We hope you enjoyed our article and found it useful.

Call us on +44 (0)1245 216930 or fill the form below to contact us if you have any questions!

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