When you need to have something translated you will probably think about searching for a translation office around you and have it translated there. You also have the choice of searching for an online service that could do the same thing, so what are you going to choose? There are several advantages of getting your document translated online, let’s have a look at some of them:
- Accuracy and consistency
The most significant thing to consider when spending considerable time and money on document translation is that you want your translation to be accurate and consistent. Obviously you surely don’t want a poor translation and things like terminology, product names, abbreviations, slogans, etc. should be consistently used throughout all of your multilingual materials.
The advantage of using a professional translator is the fact that such a linguist is using tools that can help with repetitive words, which allows translators to stay on top of slogans and phrases they have translated at an earlier stage and re-using these structures while moving forward with the translation. Alternatively you can choose company which teach english abroad. This is also important through the review process where the second translator needs to proofread the output and has to keep to the consistency. For this alone you should choose to translate document online, but there are other benefits listed below.
A brick and mortar translation office may not have resources such as translation terminologies and tools, while they could have only one translator instead of an additional one to proofread the other’s work.
- Reduced costs
Translation services are cheaper online than offline. Obviously, the translation company has to support some extra costs in a brick and mortar office therefore the translation would be more expensive Also, over time, particularly for clients who translate large volumes of text on a regular base, as the translation memory grows, the level of repeated text will also increase so the cost reduction will be visible. Using previous translations as support for current projects allows for this duplicated content already translated to be used. Take the following as a case.
An industrial company translates a large technical document for publicity in various countries. Twelve months after the first translation, corrections are done to the original English source file; a passage added here, a sentence or two discarded there. They provide the new translation of the document to their translation agency that analyses it opposite to their TM, only charging for the new content added rather than charging for the whole thing to be translated again from scratch.
- Quality assurance checks
Most online companies have by-default quality assurance checks such as auto-correct, missing tags, automatic flagging of syntactic or formatting errors, missing translations, random numbers, etc., which help the translators as they go their way through a job. This also assists the project manager during the clean-up step of the project, saving time overall.
- Reduced turnaround times
When it comes to global business document translation online, there is often demand for fast turnaround times that still deliver high-quality translations. Another benefit to getting your document translated online is that as a translator goes through new text, the software uses the existing TM to recommend previous translations which are analyzed similarly. This permits for increased productivity on the translator’s view without losing precious time having to move back and cross-reference previously translated documents.
When it comes to updates, like the case of the document above, the client sends the new data, and the software automatically classifies where new content arrives. This decreases time on either the client or the project manager’s side where the alternative would be to work through the data obtaining the updated content piece by piece.
- Project management benefits
When it comes to managing a translation document, any tool which assists speed up productivity and provides quality assurance is an advantage to a project manager. Tools like memoQ have specialties which allow project managers to work with different projects with different target languages, contracting several jobs into one user-interface, decreasing the time wasted building many projects with various files saved in multiple locations.
Another specialty of some CAT tools is the ability for a project manager to set-up “handoff packages” to be given to translators including due dates, translatable files, job status, etc. The project manager can then obtain an appropriate set and quickly see status records meaning that they don’t have to spend time sending out multiple emails to the translators to check on their work.
Getting your document translated online instead of going to a translation office nearby is a cheaper and sometimes better quality alternative which should always be considered no matter how small or large the document is.
