This article is not intended to express political views but rather to discuss a professional question in the field of the translation industry.
To those of you that didn’t hear about it, in recent days we see a fiasco taking place in the Democratic party due to poorly translated texts released to the public in Spanish by some of the Democratic candidates. The party is consequently, maybe with a grain of truth, facing accusations of poorly funding the press publications to the Spanish-speaking Latino communities in the USA for the 2020 presidential elections (Check the Link Below). This community will be a key player in the 2020 elections and the Democrats need its support to be able to change the officer in chief.
As professionals in the translation industry, we would like to raise a claim in this article that such a translation, should be performed by a translation agency specialized in media content translation rather than a general translation agency.
In the following article, we will be discussing the new topic of specialized translation agencies and specialized translation services.
Let’s assume you are a customer and you are facing a dilemma:
So, you need a translation, and you’re obviously confused.
You are not alone, the language industry was able to confuse us all, with a huge market and many players competing and trying to increase their piece, this giant industry, that is growing faster than china’s economy and its revenues surpassed the GDP of many countries,
Has generated 46.5 $ billion in the US alone in 2018.
4-Potential damage (in case of undesired outcomes).
5-Official verification (in cases of medical or legal translations).
Now we will try to discuss your choices:
Before showing you your options, you need to try to put yourself on the scale (a guide) for the factors mentioned above (Money, quality, time/volume, official verification, potential damage).
Well, first of all, let me say that dealing with a single professional can be comfortable and can many times fairly cost you less money than with a big translation company, furthermore, if we talk about a trusted and highly respected professional, you might also get good quality for the money.
So what are the downsides of a freelancer’s translation?
1- You’ll need to perform the localization process, and it can be really difficult and risky.
2- You’ll need to perform the follow-up, management of the project, and review of his/her work.
3- The volume is restricted, a single translator can’t handle big volume projects (maximal capacity 3k words a day).
In case you’ll contract multiple translators, then you will be jumping into the field of the translation industry, without having the tools nor the experience for such a field (highly unrecommended) consequently this will probably cost you much more money and time.
4- Freelancers can’t provide valid assurance and insurance for the potential damage in case of inaccuracies in the works.
Scale – Money 3, Quality 4, Time/volume 2, potential damage 1, No ability to grant a verification of a local expert
Let’s assume now that you have big volumes to translate or that you don’t have time to deal with the management of a translation project or that you can’t take the risk and you have to choose a translation company.
That’s not an easy mission as there is a variety of companies.
Did you ask yourself this question? Well, I’ll try to answer this question briefly, the vast majority of them provide translations in any field you wish, they will provide you a translation for sports, law and even translate the holly bible for you.
Would you hire a worker at your house who paints, Installs the electricity, and also the plumbing?
I would assume that It was the quality and experience that led to such prehistorical manners.
Unfortunately, as statistics show, quality won’t be the key factor that will lead customers to make their choice in acquiring a translation company’s services, at least in the encounter.
In 2019, in the era of the short attention span (by this time most of you already closed 2 other articles besides this one), you will most probably choose the company that had the better marketing department in the topic that you searched for. That’s why the stats show that most companies spend more on marketing from one year to another as it became the main recruiting factor for clients.
1- Increasing competition with lower profit margins:
Because of the ongoing competition, many companies are offering lower and lower prices. This may sound like healthy competition in a free capitalist market but the fact is that there Is a threshold that is being crossed by many companies, so at this point will the companies lower the marketing expenses?
Well, we know the answer, the choice always will be a cheaper working force, unqualified translators, low data security, and of course a lot of damage to the clients. But many of these companies count on one-time encounters rather than long-term collaboration.
2- In order to keep every possible income, companies offer a variety of services that are quite different, beginning from translation, interpreting, subtitling, SEO services, consultations, and more. This lowers the quality of the services, staff, and expertise and translations become only part of the company’s focus.
3- Some translations, need special linguistic experts and also eventually need to be verified by a local expert or practitioner from this field. But in a world that lacks specialized translation companies, companies provide all kinds of translations, starting from tourism, ads, law, and medical translations.
This is a very risky fact and as stated above some fields are very special and need further expertise and focus. But for the sake of more profits, almost no company is willing to give up the other fields and specialize in a certain field.
4- Some fields, especially medical translations, need local experts that are practicing in the field in a certain country to give their opinion regarding the translation.
One very important example that Dr. Shtewy (Internal medicine expert from Saudi Arabia) gave me of the importance of the linguistic validation process, was a significant delay in research performed by a drug company on the effects of a respiratory drug reported by patients (via a translated questionnaire), although the translation was performed by a skilled professional translator from English to Arabic, participants didn’t answer one of the questions as some words in standard Arabic had another meaning in the local dialect of Arabic in Saudi-Arabia and because the questionnaire was not culturally adapted and a local medical expert was not consulted, the patient wouldn’t answer it in that form, in this case, the form had to be changed to the local dialect rather than standard Arabic in order to deliver the idea and receive the desired response.