Have you ever thought how much care is needed in selecting your translating company or translator? It is as important as planning your strategy in other important domains of your business! Even a slight mistake on your part in selecting a worthless company or person would be disastrous for your business objective!
Communication is one of the most important pillars in any successful transaction – business is not an exception. If you want to thrive, you must select proper persons in your business to head various departments so that they communicate properly to take the business ahead by talking sensibly and aptly. In the same way, if you want to convey your thoughts to your employees, business partners or the public you must do it in a proper way so that what you want to convey is exactly conveyed! Here comes your skill in selecting a right company for translating all your ideas and thoughts!
If you, for instance want to select a translating company or translator to translate certain source documents that may be related to patents, legal disputes, marketing (advertisements), financial transactions including taxes, health care, food items or processing, government contracts or other government dealings, medicines, science, technology, travel, tourism etc. If your business is connected to any of these domains, be very very careful in choosing the proper translating company or translator!
Think of a company or translator you have save money or due to immense propaganda on the part of the company or individual and the output of the translated document you receive from it or the person. You were in a hurry; you wanted to get the job done at a cheaper rate; you never bothered to check the back ground; and so on. What you got is like this:
You indicated in the source text: 1 tsp
Think of a company or translator you ha once and the translated text shows 1 tbs once!
Your text shows payment of 1000 and the target text shows it 10000!!
You wanted to pay for 4 months and the target text translated shows 4 years!!!
You realize the mistake after the damage is done! In some cases, the translating company or the translator does not understand the end client’s culture and may use a term in the target text that may mean vulgar or detrimental to your business purpose. By the time you realize this, you would have spent a few thousands!
It reminds us the famous anecdote where, in the last moment before a person was to be hanged, the result of mercy petition was conveyed through a telegram, instead of “hang him not, release!” as, “hang him, not release!” A small mistake in placing the comma correctly, a punctuation error, cost the life of an innocent person!
In computer terminology, it is said “GIGO” – Garbage in, garbage out! What you feed is what you get!! In the same way, if you run after a cheap and worthless company or person, you get the result also to that extent!!
There are some companies engaged in translation who, without having any knowledge about the intricacies involved, try to become rich on your money and on some poor translator’s efforts! Remember – they are mere merchants. Just by speaking a few languages or owning a few dictionaries will not make a good company or translator! Even a person may be very strong in two languages but he/she may be a poor translator!! All bilinguals need not be good translators but all translators must be very good bilinguals!
In our company we check all these while selecting experts. People come with all sorts of stories to hype their chances. But by applying a few tests, we can easily recognize whether the individual is capable or not.
If you are really interested to carry on your business/trade successfully, please remember the following before selecting a translation company or a free lancer:
01. The person heading or owning the company must be thorough in the languages he/she is dealing or should have someone capable of doing this instead of depending on a few persons whose faces are unseen and transactions were done through a few tests that do not actually bring the worth of the persons selected.
02. Never be carried away by tall talks like we do it for you at cheaper rates or we do it faster than others etc. If you want quality, pay the right price for it! Each translation has its own merit. Some, being simple, may take less time and some being too complex may take more time. Hence do not force your time but try to find out the actual time required and also check if there is justification for this!
03. Never go to a company that uses machines or software for translation or non-natives or in-experienced translators since they do not work well for some languages, especially a language like Tamil or Sanskrit! Never be carried away by the so called Translation Memories because nothing can excel the human translation or human memory! The principle of “GIGO” applies to these memories!! Further, remember that you are charged for the cost of all these infra structures!! There are a lot of words and terms that you cannot find in a target language conveying exactly the same meaning as the source text. Besides, even though they might have supplied you translation memory that remembers a similar previous sentence on which you need not pay, there is every likelihood in the TMs mentioning a wrong translation due to a minor change in the source text with 99.99% remaining intact and this 0.01 would make a hell unless there is human intervention! Here comes the human intelligence to coin an apt term or word which the software or TMS can never help and it will be a sheer wastage of time.
04. Remember each coin you pay for a good translation must worth the return! If you want a text that is meant to earn the Nobel Prize, then you must pay it accordingly. Instead, if you choose to pay a few penny, you will get a scrap only!
05. We feel pleasure in quoting Roger Chriss, Language Realm, U.S.A. rbchriss@languagerealm.com,
“There is a Golden Triangle in any form of business. It is an equilateral triangle (meaning that all three sides are the same size), with the first side being Quality, the second, Time, and the last, Price. If you consider an ideal project to be a balance of all three, and therefore rest in the centre of the triangle, you can see what happens when you want to lower costs (imagine your job moving toward the Price side). Quality goes down and Time remains the same. If you want a cheap job done quickly, then Quality really drops. Conversely, if you want a job whose Quality is excellent, then Price and Time both rise.” Keep this in mind when you want to assign a translation job. The company or the individual engaged in translation will also keep these in mind as such you must see whether there is justification.
06. "No detail is too small and no effort is too great." This maxim must be remembered by you as well as the company or person whom you assign the translation job.
07. Always enter into a contract with a specific clause stating that if there is a loss of business or reputation due to poor translation, (which, of course, you have got to prove), then the company or the person translating the source target will be fully responsible for such damages and is liable to compensate as decided by the appropriate judicial system.
08. Never believe in the myth that a translation company or translator based in the same locality as yours can render the best quality service. The world has shrunk due to significant technological strides. Nothing is impossible as time or distance constraints will be nothing nowadays. You get anything from any part of the world in a couple of hours. Then why to stick to local companies or people without trying others to have the best? Remember to get always the best for the price you pay which should be reasonable and at the same time you should not be taken for a ride!
09. Ensure that you get after sales service free of charge for a fortnight after delivery so that any corrections, suggestions that may be needed can be got done without additional cost.
When it is Tamil and English always think of DoBash Trans. Why? Because:
01. We fulfil all the points raised above and your work is safe in our hands. We cater in a language that is native to our owner, CEO and all those who work for us. Besides, we have experts who have better level of education, either in translation or linguistics, writing skills, high level of understanding the modern usage, variations, cross cultural influences, slangs, dialects etc of the languages handled.
02. Expertise both in the general as well as specialized/Technical terms. For this, we have compiled our own dictionary consisting of correct terms for more complex usage. This dictionary has more than 1, 00,000 special words that you cannot find in any other dictionary since these were coined by us due to our expertise. These have received kudos from our clients and other organizations. This is meant exclusively for our use and not for sale.
03. Even though our experts work on any type of source texts and translate them in a manner better than the source, we do not rest at it. Every completed job coming to the table of our CEO has to pass her thorough check before passed on to the clients. Due to this, our job is not charged extra for review or proof reading and the rates are all inclusive. Till date there has been no complaint.
04. Our experts have better computing skills, are aware of the latest applications and their usage for faster turnaround.
05. Our clients include all types of people and companies – a small entrepreneur to a giant conglomeration both within India and abroad.
06. We are able to keep down our cost to fit into the budget of the clients by proper management of our overheads and infrastructures that normally other companies charge the clients.
07. We are happy to say that our clients are very satisfied and conveyed to us that their business could grow well by attracting more customers not only to their products and services but also to their web sites. They have better sales figures and rating. Their return on investment and net worth has increased after their tie-up with us.
08. If need be we arrange for certification of documents by our CEO as well as notaries at nominal costs especially in the case of vital documents.
09. Above all we rely on human brains and not machines or software.
10. Lastly, we confirm our commitment to the clients which is paramount to us and we do not compromise on this. Client satisfaction is all and the only motto.
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