5 reasons for outsourcing translation

In the current economic climate saving costs is essential for businesses and households. We are being influenced by external factors to minimise the spending, but sometimes the cuts we make are a false economy. Translation often falls into that category, and here’s why…

Translation is a specialist skill that needs to be practiced; professional translators convert millions of words every year and continually study the language and keep on top of its changes in order to provide accurate translated documents. Therefore, someone who speaks two or more languages is not necessarily going to be able to deliver high quality translations consistently. This leads to the following reasons of why it is better for businesses to outsource translation:

1. Most of the businesses requiring translation have very ad hoc requirements. Therefore, it is difficult to predict the demand for translation and it is hard to ensure that quick turnaround will be achieved internally. Rarely businesses hire professional translators in house, which means their translation is done using their bi-lingual staff (i.e. employees who happen to speak foreign languages hired to do work usually unrelated to translation). This puts pressure on the employee who might have to neglect their daily job in order to deliver an ad-hoc translation project.

2. In house bi-lingual staff might have a good knowledge of your product’s technical aspects and may provide decent translation of technical files, but how accurate will their translation be if they need to translate a legal document? With an external agency, such as Global LTS, you would benefit from access to over 3,000 translators where every project is assigned to the most appropriate translator with the required knowledge and expertise.

3. We can translate over 120 languages, which means that we can help with any language requirement you might have. It would be very difficult for a business to hire bi-lingual staff that would cover 120 languages. By outsourcing your translation you would ensure that your unexpected translation needs are met in professional and timely manner.

4. With large and urgent projects we can have several translators working on the text simultaneously. This reduces the required time considerably and allows for meeting those short deadlines you might be facing. It would be difficult to manage such project internally even if you did have few people able to do the translation. Juggling their daily duties and keeping on top of coordinating translation with several people would most certainly prove difficult.

5. If you outsource translation, you can negotiate costs for bigger project. The bigger the volume of text, the lower the cost per single word is due to economies of scale. However, this is only true if you outsource your translation needs. If you use your internal staff to do the translation there is no way of reducing the rate; on the contrary, you might end up paying overtime as your employees would need more time to finish their daily activities.

To sum up, there are some activities where it pays off to manage internally, but translation is not one of them. A good translation partner will be able to provide high quality services consistently regardless of the peaks and troughs in demand. You can achieve economies of scale and at the same time benefit from translators with industry expertise for any work that you might require.