Reducing translation costs shouldn’t affect quality

Involving translation agency early can save you money.

It is often very tempting to use machine translation as it’s free, and it is instant as well. You don’t have to search for translation quotes or negotiate timescales with translation agencies. But as with anything, free stuff is never of good quality.

Are there any ways that can save you money on translation projects and still maintain high quality even for certified translation?

There are definitely many issues that you should avoid, and by just doing that you can keep the total cost of translation projects under control.

It goes without saying that planning your project in advance can help. Any rushed projects will attract extra charges as translators will have to work late evenings and over the weekends, so translation should not be an afterthought, but it should be planned and prepared for. It should be treated as an integral part of your project.

In addition, your designs should incorporate certain amount of flexibility; this is especially important for websites, brochures and videos.

Not many people know that during translation text can expand in volume (especially with German and French translations), so the designers should accommodate this by leaving more white space in the English version which will accommodate more ‘wordy’ languages.

English to German translation can increase the volume of text by as high as 20%, so it’s worth keeping in mind at the early stages of the project. Otherwise, the re-designing costs will most definitely blow your budget.

It is also best to involve a translation agency early if you’re preparing for brochure translation or website translation; we can spot potential issues early and address them appropriately to avoid surprises later on.

In addition, if you have any previously translated text, do share it with your translation partner. This can help in couple ways: it can increase terminology consistency throughout your collateral; and translators can re-use parts of previous documents which directly reduces the translation costs and increases the quality of translation at the same time.

Hopefully the above few tips can help with reducing the costs of your translations, and don’t hesitate to get in touch if you’re working on a project that might involve translation as we’d love to help with planning in order to bring the costs down.