Urgent Need When I had an urgent need in translation services I was wandering how could I find the best translation provider. What is the criteria one should evaluate the provider (be it freelance translator or translation company) against?
Google for quick translations For quick translations I may use even Google Translate and not worry about the results. This gives me the brief overview and the idea of what the text is all about. Sometimes, but not always, Google makes some brilliant conversions which could be quite enough to see what the person is writing about.
Machine Translation is NOT Perfect But any machine translation needs either post-editing or thorough replacement with clear and concise translation done by human translator. Besides, no matter how good the machine translation might be it will have to be eventually corrected, fine-tuned and edited. So, anyway, you will have to do some working with what you get with Google or any kind of machine translation. In order for the idea to be clearly expressed the translated text should be adjusted, adopted and localized. It means that you will still have to do some work with it to put it right and make it presentable.
Human Working is a Must If you perfectly understand the importance of having a human intervention into your translation project another thing that you might come up with is the selection between a freelance translator and translation agency. The difference between the two is in the ability to handle the certain volume and certain languages. If you need to translate just a small piece of a document, then you don’t need to create the translation department or apply to a huge translation agency. You will just need to find a professional translator who could be able to help you with that small text.
When You would need a Translation Company However, if you have a pile of documents or Gigs of data to be converted into more than three or even five languages for worldwide distribution or international marketing then you will definitely need the capacity and resources of a whole company where each translator will be responsible for translation into his or her native language. In case with regular translations in your business you may either outsource the translation to contractors or open the translation services department in your company. Obviously the idea of opening a department is good but might be time consuming and not always required. So it would be better to contract the translation company or a translator for your language translation needs.
Freelance Websites There are quite a number of various freelance platforms where you can contract or hire professional translator on a per hour or per word basis. Here is the list of some of the websites: Translatorscafe, Proz, Freelancer, Upwork, Peopleperhour, Indeed, Remote, and other websites.
How to Search If your project is large and you realize that it can only be handled by a company you can find one on the web in Google, Yahoo, or Bing, by typing the relevant phrases like “professional translation company in USA” or “professional translation agency in UK, London”, or just “professional translation company for big projects”. You will be offered a list of links. But you have to bear in mind that the TOP translation companies may also cost pretty lot. Big companies have a lot and large expenses and fees. Besides, every employee should be paid their salary. The expenses of translation company may affect your budget.
Little Secret There is also a little secret here. Nearly all translation agencies use the same translators. So the quality of translation may be the same but the price for translation is different. The only thing that can make the big companies stand out is that they do several quality checks. But it is not always so.
You can just go your own way and hire a translator for translation into your language.