How to balance quality with price for your business translation needs

Henry David Thoreau asserts that, “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” 

This is certainly the case when it comes to professional translation services. If you run your own business, it’s difficult to know instinctively how to achieve the best balance of price and quality when it comes to your translations, for example. 

It’s no surprise that companies seek to save money where they can. It’s how successful businesses increase their profit margins. However, opting to use the cheapest translation service isn’t always the most cost effective approach. 

Cheap translation services often mean that you are making a compromise with an element of the service. What you save on the initial price may seem attractive, but if you have to commit time to chasing up missed deadlines – and if that impacts on other aspects of the projects that you’re working on – then that cost saving can quickly be swallowed up. Opting for a professional translation company that may cost a little more but that delivers on the commitments it makes could well turn out to be more cost effective in the long run!

Using a cheap translation company can also have a bearing on the quality of the translation that you receive. Business translation is a skill. It requires excellent linguistic skills and a keen eye for detail. Sloppy work and poor translations can cause businesses reputational damage and waste time on having to re-translate documents that aren’t up to standard. Suddenly, that cheap initial translation cost has ended up causing countless hours of company time to drain away!

Spending a little more on a higher quality translation certainly pays off. Professional, established translation companies can provide expert guidance on translation matters, as well as expertise in localization services. These can help to preserve your company’s reputation and avoid unexpected reputational damage (and the associated costs) further down the line. 

Additional services such as desktop publishing can also make a difference. Having the option to receive your completed translation in the correct format means that you don’t need to spend hours fiddling around trying to recreate your corporate brochures in a language that you don’t understand. Instead, the translation agency can take care of this for you by providing your translation in a format that mirrors the original. Again, this may cost more but it can save your company the time of having to do the work itself, which could cost even more. 

When it comes to professional translation, it pays to get the best translation agency you can afford. Don’t judge an agency on its quote alone, but make sure that you balance the price of the work with getting a top quality translation on time and in the format you need it.  

For further information, please feel free to contact the helpful Tomedes team.