Speaker 1: What I'm going to talk to you about today are basically nine easy ways to save money on your translation services. If you have to buy translations for your company or whatever, or have to deal with translators or translation offices, here are nine easy ways to save some money while doing that. Tricks of the trade, so to say. Okay, first of all, there are two categories of savings. First of all, it's how to save money by preparing your document well, what to do and what not to do, and requesting a quote, tips on how to do that in the most cost-efficient way possible. First of all, preparing your document. Tip number one, delete all excess empty spaces out of document. Most of your count programs today, the programs that are used to define the price of your translation, whether you're being quoted by line or by word or by character, basically these count programs count characters. Excess empty spaces are characters. So you're basically going to save a little bit of money by erasing all of those empty spaces out of the document. You're not going to save a fortune, but you might save a few dollars here and there. Tip number two, always send an editable document. There are a lot of customers that send a PDF. If you want to spend that extra money, that's fine. All in all, it's going to cost you more. If you do have to send a PDF, if you've only got a PDF at your disposal, it's probably going to save you some money just to do that conversion yourself and then submit it. There's a few ways this is going to save you some money. Basically there's going to be a quicker turnaround time. Time is money. You're going to get your quote quicker. You're going to get the translation quicker if you send an already converted document. Now you also save in desktop publishing costs. There are a lot of agencies or offices that work the time they use to convert your document either directly into your price or indirectly into your price. You can be sure that the formatting of your translated document is also what you want. I always tell that to customers. Basically send me what you want to have translated. I'll make sure that it gets translated and I'll retain the formatting 100%. It's a lot better than submitting a PDF and getting something back that you're not quite sure of. There are offices that offer perfect formatting back, but usually they're charging you in some way or another. Now for the quotation, you're also going to have a rough idea of how many words, characters, and lines are in that document. I'm going to give you another little side tip. When you make a conversion, there are usually going to be a lot of excess, empty, redundant spaces which we talked about in the previous tip. You want to try to get rid of those and save some money. Now requesting a quote, how often I have heard this sentence. How much would it cost to translate this document into French, German, Spanish, for example? I need the translation as soon as possible. It's urgent. It always is. Tip number three, send your request over CC. This might seem weird, but if you do that, if you send it over CC and the recipient gets the mail and they're one of the undisclosed recipients, that person on the other side of the computer is going to think, ooh, there are other offices in the game. There are other offices that are basically my competitors are also sending them quotes. They're going to be a little bit more competitive in general when issuing your quote. Tip number four, specify in the request that you would like a clean and unclean file as delivery or files. This is language jargon, and I do explain this in detail or a little bit more detail in my video on translation technology, but even if you don't know what that is, just by saying that phrase, you're going to give the person who is doing your quote the impression that you know translation and you know the translation industry. You're probably going to get a discount if there are words or phrases or segments in that document that repeat, because as I explained in my other video, you can definitely, if there's repetition in a document, you can definitely save some money. You're going to save money on your future translations as well, because the person on the other side of that computer doing your quote is going to also think that you're familiar with translation memory and they're going to most likely introduce that to you and explain to you that they do keep a translation memory for all your translations to save money in the future. Now the vendor is also going to be very honest with you when counting the document. Obviously, if they think that you have some sort of a translation tool on your end that is going to be able to do a counting job to count the document, then they're going to be very honest with you when giving you a quote. Tip number five, if there is a lot of repeat in a document, make sure to point it out. Now I'm not saying that you have to analyze the document, but if it's obvious that sentences or various words repeat several times, make sure you point it out. If there's repetition in a document, the agency sees that as a percentage anyway when they do an analysis. You're going to see, for example, there's 30% repetition in this document. If there is 30% repetition in the document, you probably have a good chance of getting a 15 to a 30% discount depending on how competitive that translation office is. An agency normally only pays their translators very little, if at all, for this repetition. I feel it's actually good to pay a translator a certain amount because it still has to be proofread, but all in all, if it's 100% repetition, agencies are barely going to pay for that. Tip number six, are there a lot of numbers in your document? If there are, then ask for a discount. If it's a financial document, it's got five pages of numbers, you should ask for some sort of a discount because in the translation industry, to a great extent, I'm not saying completely, the numbers are very important, obviously, and they do have to be proofread, but to a great extent, this is an automated process. Even checking the numbers to that extent are, to a large extent, also automated. Ask for a small discount on that. Tip number seven, set a budget, or say that you have a tight budget. You're not, obviously, depending on how expensive the translation agency or the translation office is, they're either going to accept it or not, but they'll most likely give you a quote and quote you the lowest amount possible. They are human beings, and being human beings, they're also logical beings, and they're going to see, hey, that person wants to try to save some money, let's do a good job on this quote to see if I can win his business. Tip number eight, if a translation is not urgent, don't make it urgent. It's only going to cost money. Translation offices often hear, I mean, they hear it every day, it's urgent, I need 10,000 words by tomorrow. It happens almost at every request, and there have even been some times where I get customers that say, it's urgent, when does it have to be done? Sometime next week. Here's my tip, just say that you need the document by a certain deadline, and that you need a quote by a certain deadline, and just basically work with that. Pure logic, which quote will be more cost effective? The one that was done in 10 minutes, or the one that took an hour? Obviously, if they took an hour, two hours, even a half a day to do your quote, it's going to be more cost efficient than if they just spit it out. The same goes for translation, by the way. Any good thing takes time. If you always leave as much time as possible for your translation, it's not an automated job, it takes time. Tip number nine, make sure that you know what your expectations are, and make sure that those are known, and also make sure that the purpose of the document is clear. This is going to save you money and rework and time. You're going to improve the quality of your translation in general. If the document is meant to be a press release, make sure you let the person know that it's a press release. If the document is meant for publishing, make sure you let the person or the translator know. There's a lot of stylistic issues in the translation. For example, if you know the purpose of it, it's going to help the translator a whole lot. That was the end of my video. Make sure to check out my other video, Translation Technology. Feel free to visit my website. Thanks for watching.