It can be quite a balancing act getting your message across to an international customer base without the extra cost of translation services eating into your profit margin.
You can save money on translation by being smart. It is often just a matter of knowing how to do it, so here are some tips for global marketers which can save you money without compromising your sales figures.
Tip One: Don’t Compromise on Quality
In an effort to cut back on the cost of translation services it can be tempting to use a cheap or free online translation service. These are not intended for businesses like yours and you will just end up with inferior translations and could lose the very market you worked hard to attract.
You need to save money on translation without cutting back on quality.
Tip Two: Save Money on Repeat Content
You will probably find a lot of your marketing has repeat content. This is a good place to save money on translation. Use a translation memory programme to keep your material consistent as well as reduce manual input.
Translation memory (TM) works by remembering repeated phrases, words or sentences that are used over and over again. It really does reduce the amount of time a human translator needs to translate text effectively without having any effect on the overall quality.
Tip Three: Use Automated Technology Wherever You Can
Automated translation technology has come a long way over the last two decades and is a very useful complement to your usual translation services. It uses translation memory to remember already used text, and helps to automate translation work wherever this is possible.
Tip Four: Focus on Quality and Reduce Rework
One easy tip to help save money on translation is to cut down the amount of rework to the bare minimum or eliminate it altogether if you can. It is estimated that rework increases the average translation costs by 10 to 15%, let alone the damage it can do to time schedules.
Make sure you use language specialists with expertise in the material you want translated. Help them to save you money by briefing them properly on the style and format you want and ensure your material is thoroughly proofread before you hand your work over.
Tip Five: Cut Down on Your Translator’s Workload
Save yourself money on translation by reducing what your translation services professional has to do. There are many simple ways this can be done, such as making sure that anything you send them can be easily edited. Sending a pdf document, for instance, may seem to make sense, but it just means more unnecessary work for the translator.