How to Reduce Translation Costs without Compromising Quality

Foreign Tongues Translation – 1 April 2019

It is common for businesses to try and escape the saturated UK market by expanding their services globally. But globalisation comes with the need for language translation and localisation. Opting for machine translation to convert your website and marketing content will be damaging to your brand and not generate the desired results globally. As said, by Edward Sapir, “language is an anonymous, collective and unconscious art; the result of the creativity of thousands of generations” and must be taken seriously. Foreign Tongues believe that absolutely nothing is as important for a nation's culture as its language and always recommend professional translators to be involved in any international expansion plans. 

However, professional translation services come with cost. Translation quotes are invariably based on the number of words you need translating and if your budget is limited, you may want to reduce this expense by using one of our following recommendations. 

1. Plan ahead

Time is money, meaning you can be charged incrementally more for translation delivered to urgent deadlines. You will be planning your business expansion for some time, so build translation into your expansion plans too. 

2. Limit the word count 

Don’t overcomplicate the content you need to translate by repeating the same things over and over again and remove anything that is out of date, unnecessary, or irrelevant to your target market. Instead, focus on the message that will drive your potential clients and encourage them to use your services. Studies have found that a reader’s attention span is between 8-12 seconds or most recently less than that of a goldfish. This could be helpful when trying to decide how much content you should publish. Try to be strategic in deciding what you want to be translated versus what may not be necessary for a particular foreign market. However, remember that you can only limit content within reason. Your content should explain your product and services enough for readers to understand exactly what you can do for them. You can also break content down with tables and infographics which would only need to be translated once, but could be used across several pages. 

3. Re-use content in offline marketing materials

You will most likely want your website to rank; hence we don’t recommend duplicating the same content online. Having said that, you can re-use the content in your off-line marketing materials - brochures, leaflets and posters, for example.

4. Make the most of current technology

Check if a language service provider uses translation memories. A translation memory (TM) is a database that stores all previously translated text, which can be sentences, paragraphs or sentence-like units (headings, titles or elements in a list). This can sometimes allow you to re-use your previous translation and save you money moving forward. 

5. Cheap isn’t always the least expensive 

You should never put price before quality. If one service provider is considerably cheaper than others, you should explore why? Is it because the language service provider isn’t using professionally qualified and commercially experienced language translators? Remember your brand image is on the line here and bad translation can be damaging to your business. Spending more money on having bad translations corrected isn’t going to be cost effective. 

6. Use a trusted language service provider 

This will not only ensure the quality of your translated and localised content is high, but also provide assurance that your projects are delivered within your agreed timeframes. At Foreign Tongues, we provide the highest level of quality translation and professional advice to the market research industry; as well as industry-specific local knowledge, with the appropriate rates and most efficient turnaround times in the business, even at high volume. Your dedicated project managers will ensure your project is delivered on time, employing a production, developed over twenty-two years’ that ensures a seamless process of transition from commission to completion, every time. 

Please get your free, no obligation, Quote here.