Translation project DOs and DON’Ts for clients

Do

Do give us as much information as you can about your project:

• Who is the intended audience (internal or client-facing)?
• What do you want to achieve with the document/website (the overall message)?,
• Are there are industry/business-specific terms that we should translate in a certain way or perhaps leave in English?

Do give us a complete and revised source text to avoid having to make additions or changes to this halfway through the translation process as this can slow it down and lead to potential confusion.

Do allow sufficient time in your project schedule for us to complete our full translation, proofreading and QA process and give you a polished document or fully-functioning webpage at the end of it – rushed projects are not the best option for anyone. We’d be happy to advise on the optimum timings for you, the earlier we can get involved, the better.

Don’t

Don’t worry if you we ask you questions about some of the terminology – we just want to make sure that the translators fully understand the text so that they can render it accurately in their own language. This is better than mistranslating words because they actually mean something different in your business to in their usual context and we just didn’t check. It’s great if we can be told at the start of a project who will be the main point of contact for any such queries.

Don’t be afraid to approach us with new requests in different languages or formats – we like a challenge. Our computer-assisted translation technology can handle almost anything you throw at us and we’d be happy to tell you more about the different ways in which it improves our work.

Don’t expect to pay normal proofreading costs if your translation was produced by Google Translate. Such poor translations can actually mean more work for the proof-reader than just translating from scratch. Get it done right first time by letting us handle the whole process from start to finish.

Get in touch today for a chat with one of our translation and transcreation experts.