Plan Your Translation in Advance
It happens a lot of times that after a client receives a quote for a translation, several days pass until a decision is made. However, once the decision has been made to move forward, in many cases the client requests the translation to be delivered as soon as possible. This additional pressure is very common in our business and can result in important issues due to the lack of planning in advance from the client’s side.
Let’s give a specific example:
A client contacts me on a Tuesday late afternoon with a financial document of around 10,000 words that she needs to have translated by Friday from Russian to Spanish. The quote states a total turnaround time of 5 business days to assure the highest quality, so the best turnaround we were able to offer the client was for Monday midday. She does not have a final decision on Tuesday, and on Wednesday she informs me that they will look somewhere else. On Thursday she contacts me all stressed out and asks me how many words we are able to translate for Friday. I offer her 2 options: 5,000 words for Friday or the entire document for Monday. She happily accepted to move forward with the entire translation project for Monday.
The reason we were able to accommodate the client’s rush demand was that we used several translators at once and only 1 editor, to assure linguistic and stylistic consistency throughout the translation from Russian to Spanish. Had the client made an earlier decision, then we would have been able to improve the translation quality by using fewer translators.
Many times, clients are not aware that translating specific documents takes considerable time, research and topic-related knowledge from the translators and the entire production team in order to secure a high-quality translation. In addition, many times the document’s layout needs to be reformatted, after the translation has been done, due to text expansion. For example, when translating from English into Spanish there is a text expansion of around 20%!
The lesson to be learned is that clients should keep in mind that they need to plan in advance as much as possible in order to receive a good translated document, as well as the fact that our clients can rely on Trusted Translation in every aspect. Please visit us at www.trustedtranslations.com to see what we are all about.