The 6 most common questions about translation services
24th September 2020
Are you looking for a translation service for the first time? No doubt you will have a lot of questions. To make it easier for you, we’ve put together a list of the most frequently asked questions about translation services.
1. What do translation services actually entail?
Put in the simplest way, we basically translate any given content from the source language to target language. Just to recap: the source language is the language in the original document you will be sending us, and the target language is the language the you would like the document translated to.
Content we translate can include anything from; market research documents, surveys, questionnaires, website content, paid search ads, videos, marketing material and technical documents. Most of the time, we also localise your content for your target audience. You can read more about our localisation service here.
2. How much does translation cost?
It doesn’t come as a surprise that questions on cost are the most commonly asked questions. The answer is quite complex, as no two translation projects are the same and various factors need to be taken into account:
- The number of words needing translation
- The target language – we split them into four categories, and they are all priced differently:
- Soft (French, German, Italian, Spanish)
- Intermediate (Catalan, Czech, Polish, Portuguese, Greek, Turkish, Welsh and Latin American (Portuguese/Spanish)
- Hard (1) (Arabic, Hindi, Finnish, Danish, Croatian, Bulgarian, Dutch, Bengali etc)
- Hard (2) (Cantonese, Hebrew, Japanese, Indonesian, Korean, Malay, Mandarin, Thai, Vietnamese etc)
- The language pair involved (are you translating from English to Japanese or from French to Simplified Chinese?)
- The deadline
- Whether proofreading or any other services such as localisation are required
3. How long does translation take?
You should expect 2,000 – 2,500 words of ‘standard’ translation to be produced per working day, per language, per linguist – dependant on the specific subject matter and document complexity. As you can imagine highly technical or medical text will take a little longer to translate.
Faster turnarounds may be achieved through ‘splitting’ the work between an appropriate number of qualified linguists. Whilst the source formatting and meaning will be maintained using this method, there will be a style difference (no two ‘hands’ are the same). For that reason, we would always recommend the use of one further linguist to undertake a final consistency edit and to ensure a seamless style throughout to produce a high quality end-product.
4. Why do you need to pay attention to source and target language?
It’s important to understand whether you are being charged per word in the source language or in the target language.
The number of target words in the finished document can end up being a lot more than in the source document. To give you an example, when translating English to French you end up with 15% more words. In this case, if you accepted a quote in the target language, you will end up being charge a sixth more than you expected.
We keep it simple. Our quotes are in the source language only.
5. Is my translation being undertaken by a native translator?
This will vary from agency to agency. At Foreign Tongues, we only work with experienced and qualified native language translators. That way we know we deliver the highest quality translation there is. Our native speakers translate from the source language to the target language, the target language being their mother language (the first language they learnt as a child).
Once thing to remember about language is that it is not just words, but also an expression of culture, tradition and a unification of a community. A person translating into their mother language will be able to capture these nuances more proficiently than someone translating into their second language.
6. What do I need to get started?
Please complete the free, no obligation quote while providing as much detail about your project as possible. If you prefer to talk to us, call us on 0800 032 5939, at no cost to yourselves.
As a very minimum, we need to know about your project subject matter, the target market, the source and target languages, your deadline and the type of file you will be sending us.
