Five tips on how to save time and money on translations

19-06-2018 Written by World Translation

Tips

Did you know that your deadline and the amount of text that is to be translated matter?
These parameters decide how much your translation is going to cost.

Here are five general tips on what you can do to reduce your translation costs and save time during the translation process.

1. Plan your translation deadlines ahead

Time is a cost factor. When you have an urgent task that has to be delivered tomorrow, some language service providers will charge more. A reason for this may be that the available translators have to work
extra hours outside their normal working hours to keep the short deadline.

Curious about what our translation process
looks like? — click here!

2. Think about the amount of text
that needs to be translated

If you only have small text segments that need to be translated, it will often be cheaper for you to gather more text and then send it for translation. Language service providers often have a minimum price on small text segments and it will therefore be more costly to send several minimum price assignments rather than sending them all at once.

Learn more about World Translation’s
translation services.

3. Consider machine translation

If time is of the essence and your text is very
standardised, you could consider trying machine translation. It is a faster and cheaper way to get a
large amount of text translated. But you should be aware that there are many factors that machine
translation software is unable to take into
consideration, such as the text’s context, nuanced
language and cultural aspects.

Read our blog post about machine translation.

4. Exploit your translation memory

Make sure that your language service provider uses translation memories. A translation memory is a
database that saves all of your previously translated texts in order to make sure that you don’t have to
pay to have something translated twice. The more content you can reuse from your translation memory, the more you will save.

Learn more about translation memories.

5. Cheap is not always cheapest
— think about quality

If you have quotes from different language service providers and one is considerably cheaper than the others, you should ask yourself: why? You should not choose price over the quality of your translation.
Often the price is so cheap because the language
service provider does not use qualified and highly trained native language translators. Bad translations can damage your company’s image and in worst case scenario you will have to spend even more money on having the bad translation corrected.

Learn more about how you can ensure the quality of your translations.

Five tips on how to save time and money on translations

1. Plan your translation deadlines ahead

2. Think about the amount of text that needs to be translated

3. Consider machine translation

4. Exploit your translation memory

5. Cheap is not always cheapest— think about quality

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2. Think about the amount of text
that needs to be translated

5. Cheap is not always cheapest
— think about quality