Languages and Rates
Languages
They often say the message gets lost in translation. However, this won’t happen with us. Drawing on an expert team of specialist translators based around the world – all of whom have had direct hands-on experience in their working languages – our goal is always to produce documents that look like they were written in the target language. We know that you wouldn’t expect anything less of us. All of our translators are native speakers in the language they translate into. Any translator who advertises translation services into a second language simply doesn’t get onto our books. It’s as simple as that. We know that in coming to us, you’ll be expecting the very best quality. Otherwise you’d just run your document through Google translate, or ask someone familiar with the language to explain the jist of it to you. In today’s global highly-connected translation market, finding professional translators in any language combination is quite straightforward. When our project managers’ experience in selecting expert linguists is added into the equation, this means we can recruit in any language pair, even supposedly “exotic” languages.
Our Rates
We can’t guarantee the cheapest rates on the market. There’s always going to be somebody else out who will offer you bargain-basement prices. But an approach like that only works by cutting corners everywhere, and that’s not a route we’re willing to go down. Experienced translators come at a price. What we can guarantee however is that we’ll negotiate as fair a price as possible with our translators, and do everything we can to keep our own overheads down. Which means that the bulk of what you pay goes where the work is done: direct to translator and/or proof reader. Pricing depends on a variety of factors, such as the language combination, subject matter, file type (word, excel, pdf etc.) and document formatting. So we recommend you get in touch to discuss your language service requirements.
Translation Timescales
Just as a cheap rate doesn’t necessarily result in a good translation, a fast job isn’t necessarily the best guarantee of a high quality product. There are two reasons for this. First, whilst translators are used to working under pressure, and indeed do so frequently, they are human as well. When any job is done in a hurry, the end product doesn’t always turn out how we would like it to be. It might be that a special turn of phrase doesn’t come to mind quick enough, or even that an error slips though the quality control process. However, we fully understand that in some cases time is of the essence and that doing the job in a hurry is a risk worth taking. Whatever your priorities, please get in touch with us to discuss them. Our only advice to you is, if possible, to plan ahead! Secondly, there can often be quite large differences between the time-scales offered by different translation agencies. This doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone who offers a faster turnaround is simply more efficient: far from it. Whilst every translator works at a different speed, they all have their limits and most tend to have a daily output of between 3 and 4 thousand words. This means that any agency that can guarantee turnaround of say 10 thousand words per day can only do so by splitting the job between different translators. Although this may not be a bad thing if your text is very urgent, it comes with its own risks and we would advise against such an option unless there is really no alternative. Whatever option suits your needs best, we’ll always discuss it with you and we won’t involve more than one translator on a project without getting your approval first.