Velior's Corporate Blog about Translation and Translation Industry

The “quality triangle” is a very basic, yet powerful way to describe the relationships between the three main dimensions of translation services: quality, time, and price. What it means is that something always has to give. That is, whenever you overemphasize one of the dimensions, the triangle loses equilibrium and two other dimensions suffer. I think this triangle concept perfectly applies to our services, and this post provides recommendations for those clients who wish to receive a perfectly balanced service. The insights I’m offering are general observations, i.e. they don’t apply in every situation. For example, a lower rate doesn’t necessarily lead to lower quality, and so on. The key message is, however, that it’s more likely to do so than not.

Overemphasizing translation quality: Higher quality of work requires investing more time in various types of quality-related activities such as editing by a second linguist, asking your client to clarify ambiguous phrases, checking terminology consistency, or automatic quality assurance check. Among these activities, editing is probably the most time-intensive process because it involves a rigorous, time-consuming check by another person. While editing itself significantly increases the turnaround time, managing this process between several team members also adds transition time. So, whenever you put quality first, you can expect a longer deadline. And since more energy and resources are typically necessary for producing a higher quality translation, your translation provider is also likely to expect a higher price. For example, let’s assume a company like ours produces 500 words of English to Russian translation per hour, thereby making $50 per hour. If a client requests a top-notch quality translation, e.g. for a business proposal, the productivity may drop by as much as 50 percent. The team will then want to double the rate per word, or else it will make just $25 per hour.

Overemphasizing urgency: The quality of work suffers under tight deadlines as less time is available for the quality-oriented activities. Moreover, if things go sideways (and by Murphy’s law, they often do), but the project schedule is so straight-jacketed that every minute counts, quality may drop in an order of magnitude because working under pressure is a major source of error. To avoid or at least minimize the negative impact, a translation team may offer to work overtime so that it literally creates additional time required to do a good job. While the overtime does help to ensure an appropriate level of quality, it may also wreak havoc in the team’s short-term schedule and usually forces folks to work beyond standard hours or on weekends. This additional effort is compensated by a higher price, usually in a form of a surcharge to the standard rate such as 50% or 100%.

Overemphasizing cost: I think this is the worst-case scenario where quality typically takes the biggest hit because by imposing a lower rate may discourage a vendor from doing their best job. One common reason for requesting a price reduction is a volume discount. Although volume is indeed a legitimate basis for a discount under certain circumstances, such discount isn’t quite as clear-cut as e.g. a wholesale discount. In fact, volume doesn’t always translate into time savings that could justify any discount. A team facing this kind of situation may want to avoid financial loss by increasing productivity. And with translation, higher productivity very often results in lower quality, up to what I believe to be an apocalyptic scenario—involving a less competent translator and/or eliminating the independent review step. By the same token, the deadline may suffer because the team is likely to have better-paying jobs in the pipeline and may, therefore, put your project on the back burner until capacity for low-margin work is available.

For more information about Velior’s translation services designed to strike a balance between the three dimensions, please see this page.

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.

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

1. There are two types of inconsistency. The first type is inconsistency at the term level. To avoid errors of this kind, we use tools such as glossaries and QA Distiller to automatically check for any discrepancies. A client’s editor doesn’t always recognize the importance of consistency and doesn’t have the proper tools to maintain it. The second type is inconsistency at the sentence level. The translation environment tools we routinely use in our work provide specific functions that make it extremely simple to avoid any discrepancies of this kind. This means that a similar sentence is unlikely to be translated differently within a project. A client’s editor, by contrast, typically works in Microsoft Word, which isn’t designed to provide such functions. Imagine that you spent your morning editing half of a translation project, then switched to some other tasks during the day, and finally returned to the project in the evening. When you come across a sentence that is an exact match of, or very similar to, a sentence you edited in the morning, chances are that you won’t remember your previous edits accurately and make a different edit or no edit at all. These small inconsistencies may add up in the long run, making the translation misleading.
2. Because a client’s editor often uses Microsoft Word for “surprise” review, the project’s translation memory doesn’t get updated. This is exactly what happened to us last week. What this means is that for future translations, folks will use outdated TM, resulting in inconsistency, lower translators’ performance, and yes, misleading translations.
3. The “surprise” review means that a client’s editor did not provide the changes for revision to the original translator. This is always a risk, since the translator is usually able to point out any incorrect changes, including the above-mentioned types of errors. By doing review in a “surprise” fashion, you miss the chance to make sure the translation is flawless and also educate your translator. You might end up with the translation that contains multiple errors and the translation vendor who is unaware of your changes and will stick to the old translations in any future work for you. This cycle will repeat itself until you let the vendor know about your edits.

To conclude, we highly recommend avoiding “surprise” review and using the normal review process instead. All it takes is just one simple step: send your edits to your translator. A professional translator will then take care of the rest: check your edits, fix any errors or inconsistencies, update the TM, and learn from your edits for better translations in the future. Good luck!

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?

The more I pursue a career in translation, the more I realize that specialization is key to success in our industry. This post provides a few thoughts to back up this idea.

As quoted in Warren Buffett’s biography, he and Bill Gates believe that focus was the most important thing in getting them to where they were. I think this is true for our profession as well. By focusing on a limited number of areas of expertise, you get better in those areas and eventually become an expert in your field. On the contrary, when you spread yourself too thin by taking up whatever work comes your way, you can expect lower performance that is detrimental both to your image and bottom line.

Look at some of the successful translators of today, those who charge over $0.20 per source word. Judy and Dagmar Jenner, the authors of an insightful book, The Entrepreneurial Linguist, specialize in IT, legal, banking, finance, e-commerce, marketing, food, tourism, localization, business. This is a very focused selection without any areas that could strike as totally unrelated to the others such as healthcare, chemistry, or power engineering. Another example is Corinne McKay, a translator, author, and translation coach who works in as few areas as legal documents, international development, corporate communications, non-fiction books, and official documents. By focusing on those few areas, Mrs. McKay has been able to establish herself as an industry expert, while also having time and energy to pursue other endeavors, including writing and coaching.

As an editor, I see a huge gap between the translation produced by someone who understands (i.e. specializes in) the subject area and someone who hopes to get by on experience and intuition. To avoid mistranslations, the latter translator succumbs to general words or phrases, assuming those will definitely include the original meaning. Also, they have no other choice than translate literally, since they can’t improve the word-for-word translation (this is what a specialized translator normally does through better understanding of the subject area). Here is an example from a recent English to Russian translation:

Source: histological anomaly

Original literal translation: гистологическая аномалия

Suggested translation: новообразование, требующее гистологического исследования

Although it may sound fine at surface level, this word-for-word translation might be questionable under close scrutiny. First, it implies that “histological” is a property of the anomaly, while it is actually a method of studying the anomaly! Second, although the Russian word “anomaly” will be of course clear to the end users, it is hardly the word they would use themselves. This and other general or literal translations tend to be vague and oftentimes difficult to understand, causing an undesirable reaction in the end users such as frustration or laughter.

Let’s sum up the benefits of the power that lies within specialization:

1. The more focused you are in your areas of expertise, the better you get.
2. Specialization is practiced by some of the top people in our industry and translation agencies, so it might be a good idea to model their approach.
3. Remember that too general or literal translations might be useless to your clients and detrimental to your reputation.

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.

The actual process of evaluation against the metrics suggested in the 1st part of this post has its own challenges. One challenge is that an editor may incorrectly assume something to be wrong, particularly because normally the editor doesn’t have the same level of understanding of the source text as an original translator. To ensure no “false positives” are corrected during editing, it is important to get the original translator confirm potential errors and preferential changes.

Easy In-house Communication

Within Velior’s workflow that revolves around in-house translation, the editor simply sits down with the translator to go through suggested changes. The translator can challenge any suggestion and explain decisions behind the original translation. Although this process is much more time-consuming than simply letting the editor go ahead and edit the translation freely, we find it worth the cost, because we see a tangible payoff in quality and employee development. The organized effort of two people helps improve translation and reduce the risk of similar errors in the future.

Communication with Freelancers Requires More Effort

With freelance translators, this process can’t be applied easily for obvious reasons. In my experience, what usually happens is that a freelance translator is kept in the dark about the editor’s changes. For instance, read this post in the Medical Translation Insight blog by ForeignExchange Translations. This is the rule rather than the exception in our profession, which is quite understandable—communicating errors takes energy and resources, while offering little direct benefits to a translation agency.

Those agencies that do confirm the editor’s changes with the original translator typically have the editor compile a list of changes, ideally with explanations, and send this list to the translator for approval. The downside of this process is that it’s quite formal, and the translator often makes it their job to reject as many changes as possible, because their reputation with the agency is at stake (“Will they trust me with another job after seeing that this one was edited heavily?”). Unlike informal in-house dialogue, email-based communication also makes it more difficult for the freelance translator to explain why a specific translation was preferred over another. Devoid of human touch, a straightforward list of errors is likely to arouse resentment and defensiveness (“I did a perfect job, and they just mangled it!”). Compare this with a face-to-face conversation: when the translator actually hears suggestions directly from the editor who invites feedback and disagreement, the translator is in a better position to take criticism more positively, which results in adding value to the translation and learning from the errors.

Do you consider it important to communicate and confirm changes with an original translator? Is such communication worth the effort? What is the best way to confirm changes with a freelance translator?

We are now revamping the process Velior uses to evaluate all work produced by our translators. The ultimate goal is to make the metrics more effective in terms of employees’ development, while lightening evaluator’s task and ensuring more meaningful statistics are available for performance management.

There is a host of existing methods and opinions on this subject. For instance, a recent post by Corinne McKay mentions the classification of errors in certification tests used by the American Translators Association. While it is very detailed, which is probably driven by the need to achieve objective and specific evaluation, it might be too complicated for everyday use in a translation agency environment. My general idea for this environment is to keep the classification as short, and the categories as broad, as possible. This is a three-fold strategy. First, by allowing to map categories to main competencies, this strategy makes it easier for a translator to identify and focus on improving their weaknesses. Second, it provides an editor with a straightforward selection of categories for grading translations, preventing them from overthinking about which category an error belongs to. Finally, it plays a key role in managing employees’ performance, e.g. by providing meaningful statistics as to which jobs cause most problems and what training is necessary.

The refined system I am thinking of now will include five types of errors mapped to respective competencies:

1. Mistranslation: Knowledge of the source language
2. Inaccurate translation: Attention to detail and concentration
3. Style: General command of the target language
4. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation: Knowledge of the most basic language rules
5. Technical: Knowledge of translation technology and best practices, as well as disciplined thought

As mentioned above, one reason for such mapping is to make the translator aware of those competencies that should be on their development plan. The selected competencies are probably among the most important in our profession.

Another aspect of the evaluation process that I am trying to improve now is communication of the changes made by the editor to the translator. This aspect will be discussed in the next part of this post.

What evaluation process and metrics do you use to assess translation quality?