Multilingual communication is now an essential business practice for most enterprises. Here are five tips for choosing a translation agency.
To meet your customers’ and partners’ expectations of fluent and on-brand communication and succeed in business outside your home country, you’ll have to work with the right translation company.
A professional translation company will positively influence cost optimization and significantly improve your multilingual processes.
But there are hundreds of translation companies. How can you choose the best translation partner that’s right for your business? Here is a list of helpful tips to help you make the right choice:
5 Tips for Choosing a Translation Agency
1. Practice makes perfect, so focus on specialists
Operating on the international market requires accurate and correct translations. This not only allows you to reach customers from around the world, it also allows you to communicate effectively with colleagues and clients regardless of their nationality.
When outsourcing translations to an external partner, ask if specialists do the work. Being a specialist can mean having in-depth knowledge of a particular language, but it can also mean knowing niche and specialized terminology within a certain industry. For example, a translator have specific expertise in translating medical terminology.
By choosing a translation company that employs experienced and qualified translators, you can be sure that your message will retain the meaning that you had in mind when formulating it in your native language.
2. Choose a multilingual team.
The more languages you need to target, the more you’ll need a robust and reliable partner. Translation agencies like ours have spent years building networks of reliable and highly vetted translators from around the world.
We also add several layers of quality assurance to ensure the translation is not only error-free, but also linguistically attuned to your target audience.
As a result, we provide translations quickly and efficiently, regardless of the size of the project. In addition, constant cooperation with an experienced team is also a guarantee that the translations will be consistent and precise.
3. Pay attention to translation system innovations and technologies.
A modern translation agency should also offer tools that automate and accelerate business processes. That includes not only translation management systems and CAT tools, but also machine translations based on artificial intelligence algorithms.
These are especially helpful in e-commerce or IT, where translations are often needed within a short turnaround time.
The best translation agencies allow you to integrate their solutions with your existing systems. For example, translation technology can be built into your company’s CMS and CRM system. It should also be possible to allow for the automation of a multilingual helpdesk, translation of product descriptions, and much more.
In a rapidly changing business environment, such solutions significantly facilitate international communication and support the global operation of the company while using only local resources.
4. Don’t forget about data security.
Data is one of a company’s greatest assets. Protecting that data benefits your business, your clients, and your customers.
The secure storage of data in the cloud of translation memory systems should be one of your key criteria when choosing a translation partner. It will prevent sensitive and confidential information about the company and customers from falling into the wrong hands, or simply being lost.
5. Look for convenience and flexibility.
Imagine a situation when you have important documents to translate, so you hire a document translator. But then your company’s website needs to work in many languages, and the translator you hired doesn’t work with websites, so you hire another translator. Then you need videos made in several languages too, so suddenly you need a multimedia specialist.
If you employ individual contractors for each these tasks, you make project management far more difficult on yourself, unnecessarily multiplying costs.
By working with a translation agency that provides comprehensive and flexible services, you not only have access to a wider array of talent, you can also shift your budget to where it’s needed on a month-to-month basis. This ensures easy data flow, project quality control, and cost optimization.
A good translation company can adapt to your needs. Translators and translations can be made available in different time zones—often 24 hours a day. This level of service can be provided only by an experienced and reliable partner.
Choosing a Translation Agency? About Summa Linguae Technologies
Summa Linguae Technologies is reimagining translation to help you better connect with your global audience. You can check out all of our translation and localization services here.