GoTranscript Professional & Cheap Translation Services

How to get the most out of translation services

Translating documents, audio files, and video files expands the number of people you can reach. Whether you're a businessperson, politician, activist, or blogger, translation services are the key to reaching your goals. Almost anyone who has an online presence can benefit from translating content.

Clearly, you want the best value from any outsourced service. If you search for "cheap translation services" or "low cost translation services," you'll be met with many results. How can you tell which is right for you? Read on for our tips on getting the most out of translation services.

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The basics of translation

Before you hire a person or company to translate your content, you should know what you need to look for. Many first-timers make the mistake of thinking they should hire a translator who's fluent in the language of the original source, or fluent in both languages. But this isn't so.

Your translator must be fluent in the target language, as that's the one you're (likely) not familiar with. You need to trust that the translator will produce written copy that maintains all your meanings and reads well to other people who are fluent in that translated language.

Translators with even a conversational skill level in the original language can typically read most of a basic source document. They then use a variety of tools to fill in the areas they aren't 100% sure of. (More technical or complex language may require a translator who's bilingual.) Even the best translators use software and dictionaries to scrutinize the meaning of the original content and then produce the most accurate translation.
So, remember: the main criterion is that your translator is fluent in the language they're translating to, not from. An ethical translator would rarely translate into their second language. An exception might be translating short, basic words or phrases.

Comparing cheap translation services

When you're looking at low cost translation services, you need to keep in mind the skill level of different translators. Some cheap translation services hire people without ensuring that the translator is fluent in the target language.

Likewise, you can hire freelance translators through various websites. Many of these translators know two or three languages and claim to be able to translate in either direction between any pair of these.

Although these translators may charge cheap translation rates, your final product may not be what you'd hoped. They often use low-quality translation software such as Google Translate to do the bulk of their work.

Google can be used well if the translator is careful to comb through the translation and make all the necessary adjustments for a fluent final draft. The trouble is that many low-level translators don't, and it would be hard for you tell if you don't speak that language. You might find out the hard way, down the road, when a client notifies you of all the errors in your translated content.
Again, you should remember that you want a translator who's fluent in the target language. If the translator can't communicate perfectly with you in the language of your source document, that doesn't mean the translator can't complete your job with quality.
Let's say you have an English web page that you'd like translated into Greek. An excellent English-to-Greek translator may communicate with you in slightly choppy English. That's because it's generally much easier to understand a foreign language than it is to produce that language perfectly.
Your Greek translator doesn't need to be fluent in English. They'll be able to discern the meaning of your content and generate a beautifully written Greek version of it.

Getting the right translator for your project

With all of this said, the skill level of the translator must match the requirements of your project.

There are certainly cases where you'll need a bilingual translator. Examples of such cases include:

Legal material
Medical material
Scientific material
Graduate-level academic material

But if you're a mommy blogger or you sell shoes online, you're going to do just fine with a translator who's fluent in the target language.

Translators with additional skills

Fluency is only one consideration when hiring a translator. In some cases, like the ones described just above, you may need a translator with specialized knowledge.

Some cheap translation services may assign your advanced-language content to any translator and hope for the best. This isn't always true, but it's another example of why you need to do your research when comparing low cost translation services.

A good translation service has a large pool of translators to pick from for any project. If you need to translate a medical article, the service should have access to translators who are fluent in the target language and knowledgeable about medicine too.
That's because medical terminology is a language all its own. For a basic translator to look up all those medical terms would take far too much time. The same goes for legal language and any other industry in which jargon is used, such as finance and many others.