Velior's Corporate Blog about Translation and Translation Industry

We are continually receiving requests from peer Russian translation agencies to subcontract work to us. While such indirect peer recognition is flattering, it usually doesn’t result in any relationship. The roadblock is our rates being the same or higher than the rates of an inquiring agency. Subcontracting work at such rates rarely makes business sense unless an agency wins a very huge translation project and, being unable to handle it all by itself, needs to outsource a portion to a trusted partner. The agency chooses to do so just for the sake of being able to take up the whole project, even if doing so brings no profit. Otherwise, it might lose the project altogether or fail to complete it on schedule.

Because such requests are a form of peer recognition, in the past, we would get so excited about them that we would rush into the relationship, without even thinking about the rates. Later, we would discover that the rates an agency expected us to work for were actually prohibitive. You can read about this kind of frustrating experience in an older post. Now, however, we are overriding the initial excitement with the understanding that this request is unlikely to result in any business. So, the first thing we now do is communicating our rates, which immediately acts as a brake on a potential relationship.

It seems that the common assumption is that provincial translation companies like ours have generally lower rates than Moscow-based agencies. Indeed, there is a common sense rationale behind this assumption, because operating an agency in Moscow might be more expensive due to higher cost of living and doing business. But the geographical location has never been a consideration in setting our rates. It is my opinion that most translation vendors are in fact competing with all other vendors on a global market enabled by Internet. This increasingly virtual market doesn’t really care where you are located physically. It is your competitive edge that determines your rates.

Personally, I think working with Russian translation agencies is an extremely remote possibility for us. Just as with most other Eastern European agencies, a major piece of their business comes from agencies in the U.S. and Western Europe, simply because this is where most clients are. As a subcontractor to another agency, a Russian agency is expected to charge less than it would charge to the same client if it worked with this client directly. This is perfectly normal, but my point is simply that many Eastern European agencies, including Russian, are likely to be turned away by our rates since their rates are relatively low in the first place.

Finally, here is the link to our current rates. I strongly encourage you to save time and energy by checking these rates before contacting us with a subcontracting offer. By the way, in January 2012, we slightly increased the rates, mainly because of adjustment for inflation, as well as our continued efforts to improve the quality of our work and be in the top 5% of English to Russian translation providers.

This is part 2 of this post. For part 1, please follow this link.

• For example, in his book How To Smell A Rat, an investment guru, Ken Fisher, suggests that consistently high performance of a money manager should always be a red flag; heeding this warning can help you avoid swindlers, as it was in Bernard Madoff‘s case. Similarly, a poorly written copy on a translation vendor’s website can be a red flag. Why trust your business to someone who isn’t competent enough or doesn’t care to put together an appealing copy even when good writing is called for? There are literally hundreds of translation agencies and freelancers on the market today, so, if anything alarms you, it’s extremely simple to cross this agency off your list and continue searching elsewhere.

3. Whenever an investor makes a decision based on emotions rather than sound judgment, the risk increases dramatically. When people were jumping on the bandwagon in the end of 1990s, just before the dot-com bubble burst, or holding on to their stocks when they began to fall in price after the bubble had burst, they were driven mainly by fear of being too late or missing “the opportunity of a lifetime.” What followed was evaporation of many small and big fortunes. In a similar vein, a translation buyer sets themselves up for financial loss if they don’t take time to select a vendor or put up the decision until the very last minute and then rush to find a vendor. This “emotional” approach is likely to cause financial loss due to lower quality, rush surcharge, and missing the chance to find a better “value for money.”

In summary, both investment and buying translation require careful due diligence and ideally close attention throughout the entire process. Unlike items on a supermarket shelf that you can pick up randomly with little or no risk of wasting your money, both investment instruments and translation are high-risk purchases, especially in today’s market with its downward pricing pressure. The key idea is to choose your translation vendor strategically and just as carefully as you would choose your investment company. And remember, buying translation is a skill that is just as difficult to master as investing. You might feel overwhelmed with the challenge of selecting and testing your potential vendor, but in the long run, it is your commitment to choosing the very best vendor that determines whether you realize a profit from your investment in translation or waste it.

I am always looking for analogies that we can use to explain to our existing or potential clients when and why translation quality is of paramount importance. One of such analogies I’ve recently thought of is investments. A major thing that buying translation and investing have in common is a huge risk of losing money. With investments, you suffer loss when the price of whatever you put your money into goes against you. With translations, you lose money by making a wrong vendor choice; that is, picking someone who is either completely incompetent in the first place or loses their commitment to quality over time. So, here are a few recommendations along the lines of this analogy.

1. Perhaps, the key idea, or survival technique, for most investors is not to lose money. Losing the invested amount basically means losing the time you spent making that money, a valuable piece of your life that you can never get back. Also, unlike the potential profit, the amount of money you can lose is terminal. When you see the last buck go down the drain, it means you are out. These reasons make it essential that you do whatever it takes to avoid losses. This is true for buying translation as well. Purchasing a poor translation means losing money, mainly because a bad translation can’t really deliver the expected results. In addition to losing your investment in the translation, you can also suffer additional loss in the form of damage to your brand or legal costs. It is therefore critical for any translation buyer to minimize the risk of financial loss just as they would do with their investments. Let’s see what specific steps you can take to protect your hard-earned capital.
2. The best practice is to investigate before you invest. For instance, when you want to invest in paper assets, you start from the top down, choosing a country, industry sector, and then specific stocks. You take time to perform a fundamental or technical analysis, or a combination thereof. If you consider investing with a money management firm, you need to look at its financial statement and previous performance. In other words, you want invest a lot of time in research before you actually invest any money. By the same token, a translation buyer should take time to carefully select a translation company before conducting business with it. You can ask for things such as testimonials, list of long-term clients, how long it has been in business, and so forth.

This post is continued in part 2.

Velior has been providing medical translations since 2006, starting with simple projects such as basic patient instructions, informed consents, or general lifestyle recommendations. By steadily accumulating expertise in this field and increasing general translation skills, we gradually worked our way up to the “major leagues,” including spine surgery, advanced drug patents, or microbial detection systems. We also make it our job to continually strengthen our quality focus, which is an essential prerequisite for successful translation in the medical field where an error can lead to a loss of health or even life. Some of the major areas of expertise and content types we support are listed below:

Specific Areas of Expertise

• Vital signs monitoring
• Cardiovascular system
• Guidewires, catheters
• Tomography
• Sonography

Content Types

• Directions for use
• Patient brochures
• Clinical trial protocols
• Drug patents
• Healthcare facility brochures
• Medical records
• Software

Persistent professionalism is probably the No. 1 prerequisite for any translator who engages in this line of work. As a provider of professional medical translations, we understand the high level of responsibility associated with these projects and are committed to always providing the best quality product. By contrast, assigning this type of translation to a vendor who puts productivity first and quality second can be disastrous. Errors resulting from using an inappropriately qualified vendor are simply unacceptable in medical projects. While a mistranslation in a user manual for a home appliance is usually uncritical, although still frustrating, errors in medical texts are much more damaging, because they are likely to have a negative impact on health of one or more individuals or client’s image. Our key competitive edge—commitment to quality—dramatically reduces the risk or such errors. For instance, it’s not uncommon for us to go an extra mile by checking a medical translation three or four times instead of two times, which is our standard process.

Another advantage we bring to the table in this area is the high level of general translation skills. Medical content is oftentimes provided for translation, in particular by translation agencies, in complicated tagged formats designed for processing in translation environment tools. Quite a few translators, however, don’t support or are reluctant to handle these formats. In contrast, Velior has extensive experience and tools necessary to process such formats. Another area of medical translation requiring a high level of translation skills is software localization. To localize software, it’s absolutely essential to not only understand the subject matter, but also to be aware of the specifics associated with this type of content such as Microsoft Windows terminology commonly accepted as the golden standard, different translation of a graphical user interface item depending on its location, hot key ampersands, line breaks, etc. Equipped with both professional skills and subject matter expertise in the area of healthcare products and services, our translation company can therefore offer a unique selling proposition to clients in this industry.

If you need a medical translation, please contact us today for a free quote.