Translation on a retainer – why it is a good idea?…
Minimising costs and improving customer experience is sought after by every business. Translation on a retainer does exactly that. This works for contract translation, brochure translation, legal translation, business documents translation medical translation and certified translation. Essentially, all clients who take up that option save money on translation expenditure and the quality of work improves at the same time.
Many would think that by reducing costs you need to sacrifice some of the quality. This doesn’t need to be true, and in translation industry it is achievable.
The way our clients benefit from a retainer set up is threefold. The main financial benefit comes from reduced translation rates thanks to a long-term commitment. We are able to agree on lower rates for the client’s commitment and reward their loyalty by reducing the translation costs. This is the easiest to monitor benefit of translation on a retainer, but it’s not the only benefit.
Second benefit is time savings. In a standard non-committed relationship every project is priced up separately. Clients send over their files, we analyse them and provide them with our quotation and expected timescales. In most cases we provide quotes the same day and the client then needs to raise a purchase order or go through other internal approval steps. This takes time and can cause delays – especially on urgent translation projects.
With a retainer agreement in place this process is streamlined. We agree on expected volumes of work, so we can have a reliable and appropriately sized team on stand by, and have a service level agreement covering turnaround times for different volumes as well as pre-approved translation costs. Therefore, the client knows in advance how quickly the work will be turned around, and how much the project will cost. As a result, they can simply send the files over and we start translation immediately. This time saving is especially useful for regular work such as translation of e-shots and other marketing collateral.
The third factor is improved consistency. Once the team of translators is established, the same translators will be used for all your projects. Therefore, they will be familiar with your terminology, they will have all the details of pervious projects and will have understanding not only of your industry but of your company and your products.
Many of our clients are already saving time and money whilst at the same time improving their multilingual communications. If you’d like to benefit from high quality translation on a retainer, do get in touch and we’d love to hear about your translation requirements.
