The companies are now trying to manage translation jobs by themselves or hire those who can do it at a lower price, often sacrificing the quality. In most cases the regular employees use machine translation tools and then refine their translation. We have the true evidence of such procedure being employed by several companies which used to place orders with our translation agency before. One time we even received the machine translated text for "proofreading". And the customer did not hide the fact that the text was simply "run" through machine.
As a result, they get inadequate translations that can affect company image and business in general. The customers have to spend additional money on correction of mistakes, and usually they have nobody to claim about the poor translation quality.
The translation agency activity can be divided into several translation groups based on the level of complexity. Without focusing on criteria, topics and specifics of those translations, the number of groups can be reduced to two. In other words, there are easy and complicated translations. The conventional border is set after evaluation of time spent by the translator on the translation and by the proofreader on checking and editing.
Our statistics showed that ratio between easy and complicated translations was one to two. While complicated translations were done by our best translators being not more than 20% from the total agency staff, the easy translations were serving as auxiliary support and training material. It was like a bonus for us and our translators. Doing easy translations, the translators and the agency were paid the same amount of money as for the complicated translations, but with significantly lower labor input. The saved time could be spent on more complicated translations to partially compensate their complexity. We had that situation until our customers started trying to save money and stopped ordering easy translations from the translation agency, giving this responsibility to secretaries, personal assistants, students and freelance translators.
You should really consider the consequences of the wrong translation of technical description, contract, medical instruction or any other document. Translation of legal, economic and financial texts, literary, medical and technical translations – they all require not only the translation of individual words but also the meaningful representation of the translated text.
As a result of poor translation, instead of financial gain the companies can face multiple claims from their customers which will eventually impair the company image, making the customers go to their competitors or even initiate the legal actions. To avoid this, ask for translation services from professional translation agencies and offices. In this case the company will not only stop spending valuable time on correction of mistakes made by unprofessional translators but also save its money and reputation among customers.
