Interpreting Your Corporate Documents
Today it is becoming more and more profitable to increase the international presence of your company. The number of people with access to the Internet is constantly increasing, and accordingly, the number of your potential clients is growing. Recently it has become a favorite strategy for marketing and consulting agencies. Why implement a complex and costly marketing campaign on the domestic market full of competitors when you can much more easily invade the foreign markets.
Opening a small office or an entire branch office in another country one of the biggest problems is a training of a new manpower. Even if your strategy involves not a simultaneous integration into several different regions, but a phased one, this will not change much.
While translating your manuals, employee handbooks, etc into other languages, you can stumble upon the serious problem of interpreting all these documents for different regions and nationalities. And, what first is seemed such a simple task will result in a serious financial expense for the company. Many organizations make this mistake at different stages of globalization. You can avoid them.
Here Are The Basic Principles That Should Be Followed:
– Create a list of regions in which the integration is planned
You need a plan and common understanding in which regions to conduct research. Say in Africa, you may need English, French and Chinese. If you also plan to integrate into Canada, then you will be able to save up some money due to the French language reiteration.
– Create a list of languages which you will need translation for
This list will definitely help you to not do the same job twice, save costs and show picture as a whole. Having completed these two steps, you will get a clear understanding of what budget will be required to interpret all your corporate documents to other languages.
– Check the price range and other benefits of working with translation agencies
It is always important to conduct a small survey, get acquainted with the various offers on the market and understand the price range. A common situation is when a translation agency with a large presence on the Internet offers low prices, but much less transparent schemes of processing your documents. At Translation Cloud all documents are processed according to the Translation Quality Assurance check-list.
– Do not order this service from different translation agencies
You can also look at local agencies in some regions, but as a rule, you will come across a narrow list of languages for which they can provide a professional translation or they will drop out at one of the other selection stages. With a full-cycle translation agency in your domestic market, it’s much easier to enter into a deal-making relationship, control their work, receive feedback and count on discounts for large volumes.
– Find out their work process methods
This is another point that should be clarified during the selection of the translation agency: whether they use only native speakers in their work or all in a row. The simplest way is to ask them directly. If you have time, this fact can be easily verified by passing the online selection process for translators in this agency. Once you convinced that they use only native speakers, you can expect that the interpretation of all your documents will be executed without errors. In any case, do not neglect the minor proofreading in another agency or delegate it to your new employee in the region of this language and ask for his feedback on it.
– Negotiate for the future
Spend some time negotiating. Show that you take everything seriously and want to keep the translation base, which was used initially. If things go uphill and you decide to move forward in yet another or several regions and you need to translate your educational and corporate documents into additional languages, the translation agency will have to use the original materials and not charge you for the translation from a scratch. This is called interpreting.
Many companies make these unwise steps without worrying about the strategy from the very beginning and trying to find local translation agencies that will perform the work cheaper, which subsequently translates into additional expenses for proofreading and correction. Also, it’s wrong to believe that a foreign translation company will do this work better due to it’s being in the very country or knowing of cultural features. If you manage to find out that your translation agency uses only native speakers, you can rest easy on this. And, finally, the last disadvantage of working with a local agency is the absence of a structured translation base, which you can use for interpreting in any new market.
