Language translation is on its way to becoming an integral part of many businesses, even the smaller ones. I realized this when a couple of years back I realized that my business had reached a saturation point in the country. I wanted it to grow further, but that meant marketing my product overseas. Now this was not as simple as it seemed because my products had a better potential for success in certain non-English speaking countries.
This led me on the drive for a suitable language translator. I left no stone unturned, and for your benefit I present my experiences below –
– I started in the most likely manner, looking around for language translation services in my neighborhood and city. It was time-consuming, looking up the yellow pages and other sources and then trudging up to the offices. Moreover the rates were quite high, especially since I required a large quantity of documents to be translated. In my search, I met a person who recommended me machine translations.
– Machine or software translations, as the name suggests are done by pre-programmed devices, they can be done online as well. I got trial translations done on a couple of software. I got some documents translated into Chinese and Arabic. After getting the translations done, I consulted a linguistics expert, who revealed to my horror that the translated documents missed out, or distorted a lot of important information simply because they could only replace every word in English with an equivalent in Chinese or Arabic. Now this meant that the unique requirements of each language were lost! Had I not consulted a languages expert, I would have lost my business before even opening shop in the targeted countries.
– All this bought me to the Internet. I had already become familiar with some language translation sites while looking for automatic online translations. To my delight I found out what I was looking for and more. For there are numerous good online translation agencies. They offer you a great variety of services as well. You can pick and choose from many suitable offers. Since online translation agencies are not bound by geographical restrictions you can also get yourself translators who belong to the country where the targeted language is spoken. Such translators also charge less but provide a high quality of work. You can also go for immigrants translators living in your country; they can be depended upon for good work and low cost. You can work with individual translators directly, as well as agencies which employ translators. Agencies will be a safe place to start because you can check out their past records and they ensure a quick job coupled with high quality, since they might have several people working on the same project.