An Audio Translation Service can Save you Money

Last Updated On: February 7, 2018

If you have ever needed to translate an audio file you may not have realised just how much money you can save with an audio translation service. An audio translation service may be part and parcel of the options provided by your usual translation services provider in Australia – just ask and compare the cost savings with a translation service provider that does provide audio translation services.

How does an audio translation work?

One of the main characteristics of speech is that in a single minute the number of words spoke can be very high – typically, over 100 words a minute. Just think what that means in an audio extract. If an audio extract is translated directly into text, then the word count is much higher than might be expected from a normal sized document. So what you might ask? The point is that the cost of nearly all translation services, whether they are legal document translation services or website translations is based on the word count. This is generally a standard way of costing rather than the time taken. This means that if an audio translation is converted into a text document it can be a very expensive exercise.

The cheapest way to convert audio files or extracts is to ensure that they are converted into documents directly using audio translation techniques. The cost saving can be compared to the more expensive option when the audio file is converted first into text then translated into another language.

An example of an audio translation

An example may help to illustrate what is meant by this sort of comparison. Imagine that a company has a marketing campaign and has a spoken commentary it wants translated into multiple languages, but in text form i.e. a document. The original language is say, English and the target languages are Chinese and Russian. The costly mistake would be to convert the English audio script into text first, then request a document translation from the newly created English text document into the Chinese and Russian versions. Because of the word count, both these otherwise document translations would prove to be expensive.

The alternative would be to use an audio translation provider to do audio to text translations directly from the English into Chinese and Russian. They still end up as documents, but are much cheaper overall because of the technology used by the audio translation provider. The translation is helped by software and other equipment which facilitates the process.