If you want to attract customers and partners from abroad, don’t forget about budgeting for international communication.
Communication is usually associated with promotion and advertising. After all, these are the channels we use seeking to reach as many customers as possible.
Marketing helps us to reach prospective customers and expand a global base. Once that occurs, your HR department needs to seamlessly communicate among your global branches.
So, if your company requires international communication on a regular basis, you should budget for it.
Building International Business Relations
Effective international communication starts with a multilingual marketing strategy. In order to communicate abroad, you either need a knowledge of foreign languages, or turn to a professional translation agency for assistance.
Set a budget for translation and look for an agency that knows what type of translation you need.
Translation services ordered spontaneously may be more expensive or fail to meet your requirements.
So how can you assess your needs and plan a budget for translations for your company?
Budgeting for Communication: Analyze and Plan
This is definitely key to making optimal decisions.
Start with an analysis of your current needs. If you’ve used a translation agency in the past, you can easily check the number of translation orders you placed and their frequency.
Analyze the prices you negotiated for these services.
When you are planning your translation budget for translation determine whether you want a hyperlocal focus, or whether you’ve got an eye on globalization, internationalization, and localization.
Describe Your Translation Needs
Here are the key categories that will help you properly assess and describe your needs when you are ordering a translation in a translation agency:
- Time for delivery: normal or express (e.g. for the next day or in a few hours).
- Type of service: interpreting (simultaneous/consecutive), translation, or localization.
- Area: medical, legal translations, technical, IT, video subtitles.
The target language is obviously an important factor that determines how long the translation will take, and the cost of the project.
In the translation industry, languages are divided into several basic groups. Translation agencies usually use similar definitions, dividing languages into three basic groups and the fourth one which includes “all others”.
This division is based simply on the popularity of certain languages in the country where the translation agency is based.
Choose the Right Translation Agency
Once you know what you need, you can start looking for your language service provider.
You can do a google search, rely on recommendations, or announce a tender. Evaluate whether a given translation agency meets your requirements, including:
- scope of services
- sufficient experience
- positive feedback from previous clients
Certificates held by a translation agency are also important. High-quality, secure service is provided by agencies with ISO 9001:2008 and EN-15038 certification.
Summa Linguae Technologies has helped businesses of all sizes navigate this terrain. Our localization solutions are highly adaptable to a company’s specific needs. We help our global partners achieve the look and feel of a local company in the eyes of potential customers around the world. Book a consultation today.
