subject: Pay peanuts for translations, get monkey's business [print this page] Pay peanuts for translations, get monkey's business
In its points 4.3.1.4. and 4.3.1.5 The EU report on the translation industry addresses the direct link between price and quality in the translation business and the high cost of saving on translations. Other than that, the426 pages of the report cover lots of technical issues interesting only fortranslation service providers.
In order to understand the source of the evergrowing number of cheap translation services, one needs to understand the particularity of the translation business. Entry barriers are very low for translation companies so an ever-increasing quantity of individuals and companies are constantly entering the market. Yet, the number of qualified linguists remains quite stable. As a resultof the ever-increasing number of suppliers, qualified linguists are facing unfair competition in terms of price, as theyare facingunqualified translators ready to work for peanuts.
These cheap translators are providinglow qualityservices, marginally better than these provided by on-line translation programs, which you can get for free. As long as the translated documents are meant for internal use only, the potential damage to your company is low, unless the poor quality of the translation causes misunderstandings that could lead to costly management errors.
Direct damagesresulting from cheap translation are those resulting from skimping on the translation of your website, for example.Regardless ofhow much the website's visitor is aware of the flaws still plaguing translation programs, when helands on a websitebrimming withspelling, grammatical and/or stylistic mistakes,he automaticallyreacts negatively and might leave your site as a result. If you are investing in driving traffic to your website without investing in turning it into a reliable window to your product or services, you will quickly lose far more than what you saved in translation, whether through skyrocketing bounce rates affecting your hard earned PageRankor through diminished ROI on traffic building.
This is especially true when you translating between two languages belonging to different linguistic families, say from English to Hebrew for example, as the difficulties in translating are compounded by the structural differences between the two languages, a hurdle that is difficult to overcome for translators and certainly for automated translation programs.
The EU report on the translation industry blames failure of companies to thrive on foreign market to the savings performed on translating the relevant material and indicates that these failures are unfairly blamed on the local management services.
In other words, if your company ever wants to expand in foreign countries, investing in a good, professional and verified translation will go a long way to enable your business to start on a healthy base abroad. On the other hand, if you want to cripple it from the start, by all means, save on the translations!
