Velior's Corporate Blog about Translation and Translation Industry

This post resulted from an internal discussion of a highly-priced quote for a Russian to English website translation. In the course of preparing the quote, I suggested to charge our highest rate while our project manager maintained that this didn’t make sense because the client would never agree. I knew it was likely to be true, but still wouldn’t budge. To sell him on my point of view, I emphasized two considerations. First, since the website was designed to sell a product, we had to deliver high-quality English translation. Second, to be able to do that, we needed to charge our highest rate. In fact, anything less than our best job could turn away at least some of this prospect’s potential clientele, preventing them from realizing the full potential of the investment in translation.

Now, why was the prospect unlikely to accept the quote? Most clients generally want to receive an excellent translation that will provide a high return on investment. But when it comes to decision-making, many focus primarily on the price tag instead of quality, thus reducing the likelihood of achieving the intended result. So, my goal for this longer post is to explain why it might be beneficial to appreciate translation as what it often is—a marketing investment or instrument—and invest wisely.

Approaching Translation from Marketing Perspective

One common purpose of buying translation for many companies is to expand into new countries to tap the revenue potential there. When faced with a vendor choice, they have a plethora of options. The translation rates vary widely—from those offered by the hobby translators to seemingly sky-high rates of the industry veterans—making the sourcing process a challenge. What is the right choice for you? The first step is to understand what it is that you exactly expect from this translation. For those translations that are unlikely to affect your business, it might be indeed appropriate to sacrifice quality for cost. But whenever you translate any customer-facing materials, it makes sense to recognize translation as a marketing expense; that is, an investment that your future earnings rely upon. When you come from that place, you perceive translation not as an overhead or commodity, but rather something of value that your success hinges on.

Saving Pennies while Losing Thousands

Even if you see translation primarily as a marketing tool, a high translation rate might still give you a sticker shock, especially when you think that it’ll be easy to translate your materials. Let’s take a look at it at a different angle though. How much does providing your potential clients with a poor translation cost you in terms of lost profits? A badly translated company brochure or business proposal can make it difficult for your prospects to understand your message, severely reducing your chances of winning their business. A poor translation is really a potential bottleneck to your expansion which can render other efforts and advantages meaningless. You might have the best product in the world accompanied by a great marketing strategy, but a vague or ridiculous translation can nonetheless lay the foundation for failure.

This post is continued in part 2.

Although dozens of both free and commercial translation environment tools (TEnTs) are available on the market, translation buyers, including translation agencies and direct clients, sometimes choose to develop and use their own tools. In this scenario, particularly typical for larger companies, a client asks a translation vendor to use their company’s tool instead of whatever tool that vendor prefers. One widely known example is Translation Workspace used by the translation agency Lionbridge. We worked with quite a few tools of this kind over the years, and I would like to share some of our experiences with them.

Benefits

1. Perhaps, the biggest benefit derived from using such tools is that they make things easier for a client through better integration of the translation process with the client’s content management system. The client is able to seamlessly integrate their translation vendor into the content production process, which increases productivity and makes the client less dependent on any specific translation vendor.
2. Many tools of this kind are web-based, thus having various advantages provided by this valuable technology. A web-based system is typically very intuitive and has little or no prerequisites: all you need to start translating is a web-browser and your login credentials. It also simplifies management and communication by making file exchange over email irrelevant—the text to translate, translation memory, and glossary are all inside the tool.

Challenges

1. From the translation vendor’s perspective, working in the client’s tool makes it impossible to fully utilize the strengths of their standard workflow. For example, while working in a client’s web-based system, we often can’t employ our quality assurance tool or have translator check and approve editor’s changes.
2. Whenever any technical issue arises in the course of translation, the only way for the vendor to resolve it is to contact the client for help. This may take more time as compared to using third-party tools. For instance, we have extensive experience with the tools we use on a daily basis and can therefore resolve any issues immediately and without involving the client.
3. Some of the client’s tools might be less productive than the latest translation environment tools such as OmegaT. One reason is that the clients don’t find it necessary to improve their tools as actively as developers of TEnTs do. A client may have developed their tool years ago and now has little motivation to improve it, because it already provides the basic functionality and the company’s employees are comfortable with it as it is.

In summary, client’s translation environment tools can be a very easy and time-saving way to provide translation for both clients and translation vendors. We are normally happy to provide English to Russian translation in such TEnTs, unless they make our quality assurance process completely impossible.

A few months ago, I tested Ubuntu 10.10 to see whether the savings generated by using this free operating system for translation purposes instead of Microsoft Windows is worthwhile. Over a period of six months, I used Ubuntu to handle dozens of translation projects. This post outlines some of my findings:

The good news is that you can definitely use Ubuntu for translation. In fact, this OS leaves a much better impression than I originally expected. Ubuntu supports at least three translation environment tools: OmegaT (also free), Wordfast Pro, and Swordfish. It also provides most of the tools essential to running a translation business: OpenOffice.org (a viable alternative to Microsoft Office), Adobe Reader, web-browser, email client, instant messaging (including Skype), and many more.

What’s the catch then?

Because Ubuntu is not as popular and user-friendly as Windows, it doesn’t offer a similarly high level of user experience. The three most serious issues I encountered are as follows:

1. Getting all your programs to work properly might take quite some time and require knowledge beyond basic PC user skills. If you want to deploy Ubuntu in a translation agency environment, you will also need to invest significant time in basic user training.
2. While many programs a translator might need do have Ubuntu versions or Ubuntu provides alternative programs, there is a good chance that at least some of your favorite programs won’t be available under this OS. For me, this list included:

• Abbyy Lingvo (dictionary)

• Abbyy FineReader (OCR tool)

• Punto Switcher (automatically switches keyboard layout and quickly enters phrases that I use frequently)

• Foxit Reader (there was an Ubuntu version at the time of testing, but it didn’t allow editing PDF files as the Windows version does)

• QA Distiller (quality assurance tool)

3. Another major roadblock to using Ubuntu for translation purposes is compatibility issues. Instead of Microsoft Office, which is used by most companies and individuals, you will have to use OpenOffice.org. Although OOO is a great program and in fact supports Office files without any conversion, I found that this support is in name only. The program can indeed handle small and plain Office files successfully. With larger and more complex files, however, a roundtrip (Office – OOO — Office) often results in corrupted formatting. This means that if you often translate DOCX or PPTX files, you will likely end up using Office to check and adjust formatting after translation, because OOO won’t be able to produce a file that will display correctly in Office. Thus, handling such files will be very difficult, unless you have a separate Windows machine with Microsoft Office installed.

Based on this testing experience, I came to the conclusion that using Ubuntu for translation purposes instead of Windows is certainly possible, but may not be worthwhile. The main reason to use a free, but less popular OS is to save on license costs. This economy, however, is heavily offset by the significant amount of time and effort you will need to invest in getting the programs to work properly and dealing with compatibility issues. Although Ubuntu is a great operating system, I just don’t think it has any economic advantage over Windows for translators.

The Entrepreneurial Linguist is an excellent book for translation professionals written by Judy and Dagmar Jenner, identical twins who together run a successful translation business. If you are unsure whether you will benefit from reading this book, a good place to start might be their price list. If you are looking for ways to increase your own rates to the same attractive level, don’t miss the chance to learn from these top people in our industry.

The book focuses on the business side of translation career and suggests a wealth of recommendations on how to run your translation business effectively and grow both professionally and financially. The authors are knowledgeable not just in translation, but also in a variety of other disciplines, which makes their perspective well-rounded and fundamental. For instance, in the professional development chapter, they refer to Stephen R. Covey, which is just one of the many signs of profound knowledge behind the book.

In fact, there is so much valuable information that instead of reviewing the book in the classic sense, I’d rather focus on what appealed to me mostly.

The marketing section of the book provides a system for improving your marketing efforts both online and offline. The central idea is to focus on building your brand by using a variety of tools, including a personal services website, blog, and social media. The harder you work on these tools, the greater your visibility to potential clients. Additionally, by investing time and effort in your blog, you might gradually become an authority in your field, which will likely lead to more customers and higher rates. The book will easily guide you through getting started with these marketing tools.

One of the key takeaways for me was the guide to building a website using Google included in the book. I already benefited from this advice by helping create a simple web presence for another business I am involved in. It took just $10 for the domain name registration and 4 hours of my time, so the savings generated from this advice alone already created a sizable return on investment made in the book. I believe this guide will be of great help for many translators looking for a way to build their online presence economically.

Another series of tips that appealed to me is the suggestions on how to cut your expenses. The basic idea is to buy only what your business really needs and avoid non-essential purchases. For example, you must never hesitate to invest in a dedicated business phone line, but should think twice before buying any gadgets such as a smart phone, which are nice to own and toy with, but contribute little to your success as a translation entrepreneur.

The authors also provide many valuable insights on pricing. They are strong advocates of positioning yourself as providing a superior service, which is in short supply and will result in increased demand. Choosing between “high quality + low output” approach versus “low quality and high output” is often a tough choice for a translator. What this means is that, on the one hand, you can translate very quickly with low quality and accept all projects even when you don’t understand them. This way, you can maintain low rates and make up for small pay by higher volumes of work. The opposite approach is to focus on quality rather than volumes and increase rates respectively. The authors support the latter approach and provide a well-grounded opinion on why you should be a quality-oriented provider and what you can do to maintain higher rates. As our translation company shares the same quality policy, the book once again reinforced my belief that the focus on high quality is right for our company. If you hold this same belief, this book might be a source of positive reinforcement for you as well.

I am confident that most freelance translators and even some of translation agencies will be able to benefit from this book, at least as a source of motivation. While some of the ideas included in the book will be useful mainly for beginning translators, there is a wealth of powerful ideas for seasoned professionals, too. Importantly, the book is so well-structured and profound that you are likely to gain a deeper understanding of, or a different perspective on, what you already know.

On translation forums and blogs, translators often express concerns about whether they should accept an offer from a new client, because they aren’t sure whether the client will pay them. Indeed, the indirect manner of contact (usually via Internet) common in our industry makes it easier to “forget” about paying your translator, because you haven’t even met them. To make things worse, due to the nature of this profession, the parties are often located in different countries, which makes it practically impossible to use any legal avenues for retrieving your hard-earned cash. This post outlines our point of view on these fears and experience with non-paying clients.

The most basic recommendation is that a translator or translation agency should carefully consider any request from a new client by using common sense and performing due diligence, instead of rushing to accept the project. You can reduce your risk by examining the payment practices sites such as Proz.com’s Blue Board, researching this client on the Internet, requesting a contract and/or purchase order, etc. If anything seems too unhealthy to you, you can simply ignore the request. The risk is higher with larger jobs, so the best practice is to chunk them and receive payment for smaller portions of the job.

Looking at this matter from a business side, however, it’s all about risk-taking. Basically, if you want to secure new business, you must be prepared to take a risk. If you first priority is avoiding any risk, then you should probably turn down any “suspicious” offers and thus eliminate the undesirable risk altogether. Especially if you are a perfectionist, losing money might be just too frustrating for you. But if your first priority is securing new business at any cost, you perceive each new request as a business opportunity and are likely to take the risk. You know that even if you lose a few bucks, this loss is ultimately just a fraction of potential profits. The risk-to-reward ratio is strongly in your favor, and you can confidently follow the cliche: the greatest risk in life is not taking one.

Now, let’s look at how we followed these principles over the years. In fact, we didn’t receive payment for just two jobs:

1. The first one amounted to €20, and I guess the client just didn’t bother to pay due to the small amount. And we didn’t find it reasonable to pursue the client for the same reason.
2. The second loss was more substantial, over €500 for an English to Russian translation of an equipment catalog. The client simply kept ignoring our invoice. As we didn’t have any legal means to recover this amount, we also preferred not to chase the client and simply learn from this negative experience.

Although these two cases were admittedly frustrating, the percentage of losses relative to what we earned from taking the risk with other new clients makes the overall risk negligible. That is why it is our policy to trust any potential new clients and reduce the risk through a reasonable amount of due diligence.

You are also welcome to read this other post, which discusses other challenges that translators may face during their career.

Sending a translation request through a mass email, i.e. a non-personal email sent to several translators at a time, is a tool of last resort used by translation agencies in case of a very urgent job. Although effective and often reasonable, this is a very controversial practice, since more often than not it can be perceived as an impolite way of doing business. I would like to use this post to explain what we think about this kind of emails and share our experience with them.

The main problem with mass emails comes from the fact that many vendors (a) don’t like to be treated like a “commodity” and (b) don’t want to run the “whoever replies faster gets the project” race. A translator receiving such email will often delete it immediately, and if this kind of requests continue to arrive, they might even become irritated. That is why we never use such emails ourselves. Because we contact freelancers not too often, we enjoy long-term relationships with a limited number of English to Russian translators and won’t risk damaging these relationships. Also, most of our projects are not that urgent to call for aggressive email tactics. Even if we accept an urgent job (rarely), we prefer to process it in-house to have higher control over the translation process and avoid the risk of delay.

When we receive a mass email from an agency client ourselves, we treat it as a business opportunity, rather than an offensive practice. Focusing on the business side helps approach the request constructively and ignore the manner of contact. Yes, we very much enjoy and long for a personal touch, in particular because our line of work heavily relies on computers and provides little face-to-face contact with the customers. But it’s not as important as the level of customer service. As a translation company, our first and foremost goal is to serve our clients in the best possible manner, while also remaining profitable, which means that the clients always come first and any feelings should come second, if at all. In fact, the project manager contacting us with such request might be very busy at the moment, with dozens of other projects to assign on hand. Our job is therefore to simply evaluate this request just as any other project, assess our capability, and reply accordingly. There is even a chance that the law of reciprocity will work for you: after you handle several requests in the above-described positive fashion, you might be soon rewarded by a personal request from this project manager instead of a mass email.

Another issue about such emails is that whoever replies first usually gets the order, leaving all other respondents with empty hands. We also don’t have any problem with this. If the agency accepts our offer, that’s great. If not, what do we lose? Just the time spent on evaluating the request. But this is a normal expenditure required to run a translation business and happens all the time, so no big deal.

And the sweetest part is that through mass emails we received some of the most profitable projects so far. They often pay well because of the rush surcharge and compensation for additional services such as recreation of formatting due to uneditable source text.

And what is your opinion about mass emails? Are you inclined to delete them like many translators do? Or do you simply treat them as a business opportunity?

I am sometimes asked about how Velior manages to maintain translation rates above the industry average in the highly competitive English to Russian language combination. I think the key to this is quality. You might say, “Wait a minute, you’ve just mentioned high competition, shouldn’t that drive quality across this combination?” You are right, of course, it should, but, judging by the translations I get to edit, it basically doesn’t. For this reason, a translator who puts quality first has a better chance of outdistancing competitors. So, which specific steps can you take to achieve this? From my experience as an editor who looked at several million translated words over the last five years, I can think of at least three main development areas for you to focus on:

1. Literal translation. Because English and Russian are extremely different, very few texts actually allow literal translation. In most cases, a literal translation is hard to read, unclear, and often ridiculous. Nevertheless, this kind of translation is commonplace in our combination. I hear two main explanations of why this happens, which both seem quite amusing to me. First, a translator often knows that the translation is poor, but just won’t do anything about it due to the lack of motivation, time, or skill. Second, many translators simply think this kind of translation will do, because they’ve always delivered this level of quality and got little or no feedback. Make it your job to never resort to literal translation, and you are on the fast lane on the road to success in your translation career!
2. Poor understanding of the source text. I strongly believe that understanding of the source text has a major impact on quality, but you might be surprised about how many translators think otherwise. It is not at all uncommon for people to translate without a clue as to what they are translating about. The bad news is that machine translation is evolving. One advantage of a human translator over MT is the ability to add value through better understanding of the text. Think about this: without this advantage, your translation becomes similar to MT output. As MT continues to evolve, human translators must invest more effort in understanding the text or be prepared to be put out of business. Change your direction today: instead of producing one vague translation after another, give more thought to what you write and look everything up on the Internet. Resolve to understand as much of the text as possible before committing it to your target segment.
3. Failure to use quality assurance tools. Although numerous tools, including free ApSIC Xbench and CheckMate, are available, many translations are delivered unchecked. In fact, one of our agency clients got so fed up with the errors, which can be easily detected automatically, that they put a special policy in place to discourage this kind of errors. This software became an integral part of our translation workflow long ago, since it improves quality and saves time otherwise spent on manual checks. Because I am so used to it now, I find it increasingly difficult to understand someone who doesn’t use translation environment tools on all or some of their projects. When I hear about this, my first thought is, “But this way you don’t get a bilingual text and can’t do automatic QA!” One of the best things about such tools is their simplicity—you can add them to your process easily and start benefiting from them almost immediately.

As many other professions of today, translation is tightly interconnected with the Internet. Some of the ways translators use it in their daily work include researching the subject matter to understand the original text and finding the commonly used target language terminology. But which websites can be considered trusted sources of reference materials? I’ve recently worked on an English to Russian translation concerning innovative disease treatment methods and referred to the Internet extensively to find terminology that is not in the dictionaries yet. I was however frustrated with the low efficiency of my research, because the search engines continuously yielded tons of unusable results. This post summarizes my general opinion on this matter.

The average quality of the texts I scan through while searching for the reference materials on the Internet is decreasing. The quality is diluted, because the useful content is just a fraction of the total content volume added daily. I can think of two potential reasons behind this:

1. As I use the search engines to research Russian terms, I increasingly stumble upon the automatically generated texts. A major source of such content is the machine translation (MT). The webmasters simply feed English (or other language) content into the MT engines and publish the resulting Russian text without any editing. Another significant source is the software that generates “unique” content by taking any text and replacing as many words as possible by synonyms. As seen by the search engine crawlers, this content is indeed unique, but for the human users and especially translators, who look for the commonly used terminology, it is of no practical use.
2. The abundant human translations also contribute to diluting the content quality. While the Internet is certainly home to many well-crafted translations, a huge portion of translated content gives rise to concern. In particular, I find it hard to trust the terminology. For this reason, I rarely use translations as the reference materials. The odds of a literal or incorrect translation are just too high for me to take the chances. I’d rather invest more time in finding texts written by the subject matter experts using their native language.

In the light of these observations, I am often surprised by the criticism of Wikipedia. I do realize that it’s not ideal, just as nearly any other crowdsourced initiative. But, as a whole, it might be one of the best general knowledge resources we’ve got on the Internet, simply because there is no other website that provides the same amount of reliable content under one roof. The additional benefit is the well-structured, easy-to-use GUI. Naturally, the translators should not use it as their only source, but at least it’s a good place to start-you can develop a basic understanding of the subject matter and then continue researching by using the available links or keywords.

You can read more about how the Internet helps translators in this post.

While reading The Associate by Jonh Grisham, I came across a thought that resonated with some of my professional experiences as a translator, despite the different settings. The main character, a young law school graduate who has just started at the bottom of a large law firm, works in the corporate office basement reviewing documents the entire day. He soon realizes that, although the client is being billed $300 per hour, this work is completely meaningless and will never be used. He ends up thinking: “At that moment, his father was either in his office counseling a client through a problem or in a courtroom mixing it up with another lawyer. Regardless, he was with real people in real conversations, and life was anything but dull.”

Now, why does this situation resonate with me? Just as the main character, I sometimes wonder whether my work will be used at all and feel like there is little connection between what I do and the end users. Below are a few general translation industry observations explaining why I feel so occasionally:

1. Clients sometimes view translation as a mandatory, but actually useless provision rather than an enabler and business asset. A great article on this has been written by Terena Bell. As a consumer, I am strongly opposed to this approach, because, even though I understand English and German, I still prefer products that come with documentation and interface correctly translated into my native language. Let’s use the currently popular HD media players as an example. With these players, all user interaction is typically happening through a graphic user interface (GUI) on a TV screen. If I buy a media player with a well-localized GUI or read a review that praises excellent translation, I will likely become a loyal customer of this company, which makes me a potential buyer of their next generation products and a supporter who might recommend them to others. On the contrary, when I encounter a faulty GUI, I might lose the respect for the manufacturer and will certainly discourage those, who do not understand the original language and will have to use the localized version, from buying the product.
2. Many translators collaborate mainly with agencies and don’t get to know or work with the end users of their translations. Also, most translation assignments are handled over the Internet these days, taking the personal touch out of the equation. For me, working with the end client directly is a completely different experience. When you meet the client in person and discuss why they need your services and what their expectations are, you feel that your work is important to them. Knowing exactly how the client will benefit from your services helps you feel more connected to the real world and “real people.”
3. With about 90% of our work, there is no feedback whatsoever from the end users. This sometimes makes me think that no one even reads those translations and increases the feeling of being detached from the real world.
4. Quite a few translations, in my experience, don’t make it to the end users, because the project is being canceled halfway through. For example, a few web-sites Velior had translated in the past never made it to the web. In such cases, the translator’s work is again useless. One reason could be that the clients are just unsure whether they need a translation at all, and after a second thought prefer to cancel the request, even if the translation is already at the editing or desktop publishing step.
5. Some translations are requested for reasons other than making them available to a target audience. For example, legal documents are often translated for compliance purposes only, not for reading. Just as Grisham’s character’ work assignment, they simply need to be done, but are of no practical use.

The good news though is that with most translations we do at Velior I feel that our translation is important to the client and the effort we put into delivering high quality will be appreciated. This is why I specialize in and enjoy medical translation such as medical device manuals: their users are always supposed to read the documentation to make the best use of the products, because other people’s lives might depend on this. Knowing that quality is important to them motivates me to continuously improve and excel in what I do.

Interestingly, among other innovations, the Internet has dramatically improved translation quality. Let’s look e.g. at the movie translation. Until the Internet, the translators could only watch the movie again and again in pursuit of correct understanding of the source speech. This resulted in lower quality for the end users. On the contrary, today’s translators enjoy working with easy-to-use film scripts and therefore produce better translation with less effort. Ultimately, the end users benefit from greater quality. Importantly, the translators themselves also benefit from being able to access the written scripts instead of deciphering oral speech, which means great time savings that can be used directly for improving quality.