PUBLICATIONS
How to Save on Translation Costs for Your Business!
Avishek Bhattacharya
If you’re looking to enter global markets with software, an app or a website, then it’s clear that you will need to translate and localize your digital products. To optimize your globalization effort, you should consider a number of factors that could save you time and money. In this article, you’ll learn how to save on translation costs while maintaining great quality in the long term.
Making Tactical Savings
A poor-quality translation damages your business’s image in new markets and hurts your reputation. So, don’t be scared to seek out professional translation services to ensure accurate, first-class localization, especially as there are many ways you can achieve cost savings while actually improving quality at the same time.
The quality of the source material, word count, turnaround times, and translation workflows are all factors that could impact your translation budget. Read on to learn how efficient processes and tools like translation memory can help you improve results while reducing the cost.
Planning Your Translation and Localization Project
Where do your consumers live? What do they want? Which languages do they speak? Which region does most of your web traffic come from? Answering these questions will help you decide which language pairs to prioritize for your translation project.
Make sure to set up efficient project management: detailed planning of your website translation or app localization will reduce mistakes and additional costs later on. Avoid last-minute changes to the source text as they could lead to pointless additional work.
It’s also important to make sure that your content management systems will be able to handle the localized copy. Translated text will often be longer than the original, but it will still need to fit into all of the buttons, dialog boxes, menus, etc. used in your product. You’ll also need to think about any different date or currency formats that may be required.
Quality of Source Content
Before delivering any content to a translation management system, translation agency, or language service, make sure the source content is well prepared.
Streamline your source text and make it more effective if needed: check it for redundant copy and edit accordingly. An optimized original file is easier to translate and it means less content to localize – your cost savings increase with the number of languages you need the content in.
Terminology Supports Consistency
When it comes to high-quality source content, one of the most important factors is consistency. The more consistent your existing content, the more you are able to reuse. One tool which can help you to achieve this is a clear and comprehensive terminology database or glossary.
Creating a terminology database helps you keep track of terms, definitions and concepts, and make more frequent use of them. A database will cut translation turnaround time and costs, and improve the quality of your localization all at the same time.
Technology Helps You Save on Translation Costs
Translation memory is another vital tool that will help you achieve consistency and an efficient translation workflow. Simply put, a translation memory is an ever-growing database where you store your original copy in segments together with the associated translations for any language pair. Any of these translations can then be easily reused.
If you work on product updates or website revisions, the translation memory will suggest matching results of translated segments. This will help to speed up the translation process while also improving consistency and maintaining quality across your projects.
You can further reduce costs by using computer-assisted translation tools, which automate certain steps of the localization process.
How do Translation Management Systems Work?
Translation management systems bundle all of the benefits that technology has to offer when it comes to efficient, high-quality translation processes. With a translation management system, all stakeholders, including developers, translators, and project managers, are able to work on a single platform, making collaboration easy and seamless.
What Will Affect the Cost of Localizing a Mobile App?
Entering new markets, increasing conversion rates or in-app purchases – there are many reasons to localize your mobile app or software. But whether you want to localize an app or a website, factors that will influence the cost include the total word count and any images that will need to be localized as part of the project.
Business Development Manager
