Tackling A Localisation Myth – 2 – Lower Word Rates Reduce Overall Localisation Costs
If you’re in the business of buying words you may be attracted by all sorts of companies offering you cheap deals – hey, there’s a lot of cheap hotel and airfare deals going on at the moment, so why not a summer sale on words? It does sound good doesn’t it?
You get a bunch of translation work completed for your software, documentation or marketing materials at a lower rate than some of those professional translation companies are offering, AND you can tell your Boss you’re saving the company a whole bunch of cash [which should be your bonus at review time]!
Buying this could be a short term cost saving strategy...
However, you may want to consider some more factors when looking at translation and translation partners.
First up, what translation processes are your prospective vendors going to use – are they using the most up to date translation memory tools? Good translation memory tools [specialized language database apps] enable a more cost-effective means of updating translated text between product versions – so essentially they reduce the cost of translation over the period of a product revision or iterative versions of Marketing collateral. And if you’re told that you don’t need translation memories for your projects, be afraid. Be very afraid.
Secondly, you need to ask your translation partners what their policy is on translations that don’t exactly match between releases – or sentences that are repeated; or even match exactly. Sometimes there can be hidden higher costs for these items, affectionately known as “fuzzy matches” – though they may make your brain go fuzzy when you see the cost. So whilst it seems the word rate for new words is very low, the higher rates for other types of words in the project could make for a longer term higher cost [darn, there goes the bonus].
So, I’ve managed to go through two points without mentioning the famous “Q” word. Yes, as you can guess it’s all about Quality. A company that charges slightly higher rates for translation may be a safer bet if that “Quality” word is important to your product or service – or sales pitch. And this can really come back to bite you when Distributors, or local Sales people – or in-country Tech Support personnel get a look at what you’re saying in their native language. If quality does matter, you just don’t want to get into that haggling “re-work” process [especially if the translations are linked over a variety of source materials such as websites, manuals with screenshots, and tag lines in marketing collateral].
When buying at a very low word rate, you are often buying non-professional translation; and you are definitely not buying services. Do not underestimate services! The higher word rates include services that you will not get at cheaper rates. The work is done by professionals, chosen for their knowledge in your area of expertise, for their experience and for their quality. What you are buying is non advertised tips, suggestions, advise and the occasional free translations for smaller urgent requests. What you are buying is insurance that you will not have to worry about localisation or localisation issues because someone else is doing it for you.
Before I head for the summer sales, here’s my final advice; think through the process; if you’re in the International market for the long haul the lowest bid may not be the cheapest in months to come. You need to match your requirements around cost and quality, to what’s on offer. Caveat emptor!
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
[...] word shown in the picture. Click on the picture to hear an audio file of the word. Acceptable …Tackling A Localisation Myth 2 Lower Word Rates Reduce …So whilst it seems the word rate for new words is very low, the higher rates for other types of [...]