Have you been thinking of expanding your marketing efforts by translating some or even all of your marketing content in order to reach another audience? If you have, one of the biggest questions that are bound to pop up is whether you should have an in-house team do the translating for you or whether you should simply hire an outside company that dedicates itself to translations.
Is In-House Translating A Good Idea?
What in-house translating is should be obvious but there is a lot more to it than most people realize. Imagine that you have an employee who happens to speak French; you could not, or should not simply make him start translating content into French and expect professional results because translating is probably not what this employee has experience in or is even good at.
Translating from one language to another is not as simple as it sounds; there are complicated things that have to be well understood such as idioms, different language structures, expressions that are particular only to a specific region, and so on. Companies that choose to have an in-house team translate content will often put that together with members from different areas and the end result is not exactly ideal.
Even if a company chooses to hire someone who actually has a translating background, chances are that this person alone will not be able to produce the high-quality or even high-quantity work that you would expect from a professional company that fully dedicates itself to the art of translating. Plus, what if you suddenly want to translate content into yet another language? A company that offers professional translation services would be able to provide you services for just about any language you might be interested in. With all of this in mind, you should be able to see that in-house translating is not really a great idea unless you already have a translations team with a good amount of experience in this. Technical translations by Espresso translations will help a lot.
Efficiency is Very Important
Something else that has to be considered when deciding whether to assign a translating job to someone in the company or hiring an outside service is efficiency. How big is the job in question and how fast do you need it? If the content that we are talking about consists of some 6000 words, for example, you might expect someone to translate it in a couple of days…someone who knows what he or she is doing that is.
Anyone who knows anything about this subject will be able to tell you that you can expect a professional translator to produce anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 words a day; this would be high-quality content that you can depend on to be accurate and exactly what you need.
Of course, we are talking about someone with experience in translating here. If you decided to ask someone in your company to do the same job, it would certainly take them much longer since they are not quite used to doing so. What if you ask an employee to translate and still expect them to perform their normal duties? Then efficiency absolutely goes out the window because that translation is going to take weeks and the quality will not be anywhere close to what you would get from a company that offers professional translation services.
Choosing the Right Translation Services
Of course, the main reason that a lot of companies choose to ask an employee to translate marketing content (or any other type of content) for them instead of immediately looking for a professional company to do it is to save money; but are the savings really worth it? Perhaps for one small job every now and then it makes sense to use in-house help but if you expect to have a constant need for translations, the best thing to do is to reach out to a company that does so professionally.
The benefits that you get from dealing with professional translators are enormous. You will be certain that you are getting the quality that you expect and you will be getting it on time every time without having to have some of your employees sacrifice precious time and effort away from their normal duties. At this point, you might be wondering what you should do to hire the right company for translation services. One of the things that you should look for is experience; do not be afraid to ask any company that you contact about their experience and who they have worked with.
