The role of a translation company or agency is to provide translation services to different clients depending on their needs. We agree translation companies have a proficient team of translators from different fields such as; medical, legal, technical, and many other fields, but for it to smartly deliver right translations, it needs the guidance from the client. This requires you as a client to work closely with translation service providers to avoid inconveniences and receiving poor quality or translated content that doesn’t match your requirements.
Ways to work smarter with your translator’s team
Prepare a clear and already proofread content in the source language; before you submit your written content to be translated by your chosen agency, make sure you have written it well, cross-checked for errors such that its error free in the source language. If your content is full of errors in the source language, it can create much time wasted because your translators will be contacting you over and over to sort out such mistakes or instead to re-write the whole content which affects the deadline and increases the costs. So when preparing your content, try to be concise and accurate, do the proofreading and also ensure that the content speaks what your target clients need.
Brief your translation team before the translation starts; with briefing the translators, you are expected to guide them to be aware of all your requirements, guidelines, glossaries and style you want the translated work to look like. Do not make your own requirements, you must have known all the needs of your target clients and that is the briefing you give the translators.
Being available during the translation process; During the translation process, you should be available to answer questions regarding the brand style and terminology. This is because, different projects have different terminologies, so it’s you, the project owner who should be available for clarification.
Define your quality expectations to the translators; tell the translators responsible for your translation project all your quality expectations of the work, agree that poor quality work will not be accepted and paid for because it spoils your business brand image. If you alert a translation company on what you expect your project to be, their project managers will take care when supervising the translators since they are much aware that poor or inaccurate translations will spoil their agency’s name as well and lose clients.
Don’t let your project to be divided between two translators, if it’s dedicated to one translator in step one, let that very one complete it then let the second translator do the proofreading and corrections. After the translation team has finished their work, you can still have a separate team of reviewers who will be working together, they will review and ensure that work is error free, or where the adjustments are needed, they can make it.
Ensure that your reviewers have adequate knowledge in computer-assisted translation, if not, encourage them to attain training in CAT. This will help them when editing, managing and storing the translations using the translation memory for future use. It will be useful for you if the information is stored such that, when you have the same project, all the terminologies and glossaries will be easy to get.
Keep communicating with the translators in charge of your project for better translation results. For quality results, you have to get in touch with the translation team. This will help them to be in line with your requirements when translating you keep reminding them what you really need though you explained before translation commencement of the translation exercise.
Ensure that you are working with native speaking translators; if your target language is Chinese, please make sure your project is assigned to a Chinese native speaking translator. This is because language can be best translated by a native speaker than a person who just learned it. However, if your project is given to a non native speaker of Chinese, there can be some mistakes in the translation, such as grammar, word spelling errors, then translating project terminologies to suit the lay mans’ understanding may become a big problem. In addition to that, insist to know the experience of the translators and it should at least be five years in the field. Ensure they have a better experience and can translate for your sector, if you mindless about that, then they will struggle with the hard terminologies in the project which may end up delivering inaccurate translations
Sum up
Therefore, working closely with a language translation services provider will help you get accurate and professional translation services.
Working with a translation company is the best idea for all global business. They will be relying on translation companies to access translation services for their business documents. However, the purpose of this article is to show how you can go about working with a translation company in case you intend to do so.