Could This Be You?
You are part of a busy organization. You’ve got a lot to offer your clients and you love what you do. Your biggest focus is on getting your job done well and eventually getting a lot more clients consistently. You want your business or organisation to grow and you want more clients / customers. You realize that in order to be successful in the international marketplace it is essential to speak the language of your customers and prospects.
Maybe you have your sights set on growing your exports. Or maybe you’re struggling to communicate with your staff, business partners, customers. Your days are filled with client meetings, emails and creating great products and services for the international marketplace or trying to reach out to the local community. You wonder how to boost your sales?
What went wrong?
It’s only natural that some things simply get left behind. Translating your website, product or service documentation could be one of them. You simply don’t have the time or the staff to deal with the translation workload. And so you keep putting off finding the right translation agency to work with and end up rushing about getting documents translated at the very last minute. Or maybe in the past you have had things translated and they ended up being inaccurate or clumsily worded or maybe you decided to cut down on your cost and had it done in-house and the results weren’t exactly what you or your customers expected. Now you feel you’ll never want to find yourself in that situation again.
The story…
The above is a story so many business owners can relate to. Last summer a client from China told me a story about how they outsourced the subtitling of their video material that they had produced for one of their clients to a ‘cost-effective’ translation agency based in China. As it usually happens when businesses try to cut their costs down, the translation that my client received was not only of very low quality but the end client also had serious concerns whether or not it was nothing more but a 100% Machine Translation.
Added cost
What happened was that the client not only had to request a complete remake of the whole translation but they also got themselves into a dispute with the Chinese translation agency as to whether it really was Machine Translation or not, which the agency obviously denied. Eventually, they hired our team to resolve the dispute and to decide which side was right. And guess what? All our translators agreed it was 100% Machine Translation. It was double the original cost for our Client, double the time spent on the project and a dent on the production company’s reputation.
Final thought
Clients outsourcing translation services want to be sure that their text not only is translated correctly but is also well written and checked for any mistakes so that it reads as if it was written in the target language giving them the peace of mind that they so desperately need. Unless corporate client learn that lesson, we will keep hearing stories like this for many years to come…
PS.
The same client contacted us a few weeks later saying that they were very pleased with our service and asked if we could translate their website content for them as from then on they would only use us for all their translation needs. We said we would be more than happy to help. When nothing happened for the next couple of days, I approached the client and asked if they were still interested in pursuing that website translation they had mentioned the week before. The client said… they’d decided to do it all in-house this time. A lesson learnt…