Professional Translation Company Selection

There are many other factors that may be important to you based on your needs, like ISO certifications, specialized technical or language requirements, or perhaps unique schedule requirements. But overall, once the 5 factors discussed in this article a few will stand out from the crowd.

Here, we list a few of the most important factors to consider;

1. Coordinating in-country feedback. Translation efforts are a two‐way street between all stakeholders like developers, authors, translators, reviewers, localizers, and in-country end-users. Does your professional translation company offer a collaboration portal that facilitates teamwork among all stakeholders? Or do they leave you to your means and limited resources to secure needed input from your in-country staff and ensure accurate translations?


2. Building a glossary. We talked in the previous blog about the importance of leveraging previous translations and the use of Translation Memory tools to do so. But a translation memory is only one asset that is needed to ensure full consistency and accuracy. The other critical one is the Terminology Database, or glossary. Will your professional translation company build a lexicon in all languages they translate into for you over time and host them? Do they offer a terminology database portal that can make this lexicon securely available to all who need it, including your partners that integrate their products and services with yours?


3. Maintaining the translation and terminology databases. Building translation assets is very important. Maintaining them is just as important! When changes take place to the target languages due to feedback from users or reviewers, a process should be in place to apply these changes not only to the target files, but also to the translation and terminology databases. Otherwise, changes will vanish in the next update when data is leveraged from obsolete or incomplete databases.


4. Expanding the team of translators. As your requirements evolve and expand, you need a professional translation company behind you to support and attend to these requirements. This often requires adding more translators to the translation team, optimizing their performance and quality, enhancing their know-how of your product and requirements, ensuring continuity in the style and terminology, and augmenting language offerings as you need it when targeting a larger international audience.


5. Anticipating your needs. This is where the good separates from the great. A great professional translation company will anticipate your needs, plan for them and ensures that they are met with every project. How do you know the good from the great? Just ask them if they survey their clients each year and what the results are. You want 95% or higher success rate in meeting quality, budgets and schedules.

Read more in our complimentary whitepaper 10 Ways to Reduce Localization and Translation Costs