How To Cost-Control Your Translation Needs To Fit Into Your Budget For 2021

With timelines growing shorter and budgets growing smaller, professional translation may sound like something of a luxury and you are considering cheaper alternatives to expanding into foreign markets. But before you risk compromising on quality and alienating your international audience, we’d like to introduce you to the core ways your translation budget can be kept to a minimum.

Learn about the preparations you should make to fully optimize your translation budget, the tools Languages Service Providers (LSP) use in order to cut costs and turnaround time while maintaining quality, the value of selecting the right service, and whether to choose an LSP or a freelancer.

First Things First: Maximize Your Translation Budget With Top Preparations

Translation work should be always planned well ahead and there are some crucial choices you should make early on in the process. Here is what you do!

Prepping And Internal Communication

• As a rule, it is best to schedule translations on a regular basis (think monthly or quarterly) to keep track of everything you have coming in, most importantly, going out. Also, inform your internal stakeholders of the importance of planning ahead
• Once requested, your translation budget should be tracked. Choose wisely in this and select a vendor who is transparent in their costs and policies.
• Make sure you scope your project and prepare everything you need up front. Ad-hoc or small additions you think of later, especially when they will need to be added under specific time pressure, can add to your translation budget quite significantly.
• Speaking about scoping, make sure you are aware of the preparation you can do yourself so the translation team can work faster, more efficiently, and save you money. This includes tracking your websites and identifying the languages you would like your material translated into, briefing the vendor of your goals, brand mission, and target audience, and even ironing out some technical details. More in this below!

Consider Long-Term And Strategic cooperation To Maximize Your Translation Budget

Feel free to ask your translation partners about the possibilities of any discounts related to high-volume projects and/or long-term strategies. And know that even though it is recommended to offer your provider the opportunity to be involved in the process from the start so that everything can be streamlined, it is also possible to request the services separately. This means that if you can see which parts of the process you feel fit to handle on your own, and which ones you would like to outsource to professionals.

Use The Translation-Friendly Format: XML-Files

That’s right, even choosing the appropriate file extension can help cut your translation budget. Like we said in the previous paragraph, using a Translation CAT tool would be very beneficial in terms of achieving shorter turnaround times, making the translation process seamless and more productive, and eventually, saving cost while ensuring the best translation quality outcome.

But this CAT Tool is also compatible with XML-files. Localization Engineers can then easily prepare the XML files for translation, excluding or locking the shortcodes, regular expressions, and none-translatable text. As a result, translators will be able to identify and translate technical content without changing XML codes. This is particularly important to ensure that your translated content can be imported back safely into your website, application, or software. This makes the whole process easier, faster and more efficient, and as a result also cheaper.

But it also goes beyond that. Desktop Publishing, or DTP, is a service that ensures the formatting of your project is perfectly aligned with the original and also adapted to the requirements of your target locale(s). DTP is highly detailed work and so, it can pretty costly. If you work from a tool using XML, a style sheet will be available so that translated content will be formatted automatically. DTP might still be needed in terms of the cultural tweaks, but any formatting issues to be fixed, can be avoided.

How Your LSP Does It: The Right Tools Can Keep Costs Down

The key to what makes an LSP successful is not just in the quality of their services, but how fast they can provide them. This is why the most prominent vendors out there will talk about their tools and streamlined internal processes alongside their specialized professionals. Here are the tools that make sure costs can be kept at a minimum.

Automation Combined With Human Intuition

Apart from the very rare cases, every translation needs a human touch. For the processes that are repetitive such as downloading, uploading, and basic issue resolutions, a streamlined and automated process can be implemented to drastically cut the turnaround time and manage errors.

The best workflow is dynamic and combines both automation with human intuition in an integrated way.

For example, below you will find an example of a streamlined process for a large scale subtitling project. While subtitles are a unique content type that needs a human touch, bigger projects can still benefit from Machine Translation (MT) and partial automation if it is effectively supported by human Quality Assurance.

Linguistic Tools And Guides

Qualified LSPs out there know how to effectively leverage linguistic tools that help increase performance, reduce costs, and maintain a client’s identity and goals. For this, LSPs use a Translation Management System (TMS) and Translation (CAT) Tools enriched with:

• Glossaries containing core terminology that defines the business and specific instructions on how certain strings should be handled. Make sure you develop your glossary well up-front and go through all your translatable content to choose frequently used terminology. Not only will your translations be more qualitative, but you will also create a term-base where each translated word can be saved for future use and not charged again.
• This brings us to Translation Memory (TM). A TM is a database where the English terminology and its translated equivalent are stored. This database will be used for each of your future projects so existing translations will not be charged a second time. This means that as your cooperation with an LSP progresses, your translations will get cheaper as more repeated content gets saved in the log and reused once applicable.
• While not technically a tool, style guides are delivered by clients to provide guidelines about specific formatting preferences and the tone and style of the target content. With style guides, costs and time can also be cut significantly because these guides will prevent a back and forth between clients and LSPs regarding more subjective changes.