In Romania, today you can find on the market a large number of options when it comes to providers of translation services. There are figures that speak of 50,000 authorized translators.

Paraphrasing, we would say “little France” or now taking account of the geopolitical actuality, one of the many stars of the American universe that is constructed at the global level, starting with how we feed ourselves physically under the form of fast-food, or psychologically through the omnipresent cultural level of “shift”, “enter”, or “delete”.

On one hand we have authorized translators, who work as freelance, offering more reasonable fees due to the reduced costs, while on the other are translation offices, which number a few hundred and which collaborate with authorized translators promoting offers one more attractive than the other. Along with competitive rates, free teaching, DTP processing, professionalism, and rapidity of services provided is the guarantee of the quality of translation in unique sales proposals of the actors on the translation market. This is a characteristic which many promote, but it often leaves something to be desired and the clients complain about the translation of a technical or medical term in the source language that is completely wrong in the target language and doesn’t fit the context in the original document.

Any leader of a company or project manager has been challenged by this feeling: to always follow the growth of the company numbers and to improve its image over its competitors. For this, globalization is needed, or pure and simple overcoming the size that its entity has at a given moment.

Fortunately, we have the internet! Statistics show that only 27% of companies on the market speak English as their primary language. If they want to send a message straight to the target, to all of these potential clients they will need to literally speak their language.

So, what will you do? You go to the omniscient Internet and look for estimates. But they’re very expensive! At least, that is what you think at the moment. In many cases, these prices are justified and any calculation we make would show that it’s definitely worth a few more coins. In what follows I want to go through a few reasons that will allow you to see what translating is really like.

Brand Image

While some errors are amusing, others can prove to be unprofitable, with the possibility that they may damage the client’s image of the company. In talking about your image, of course you don’t want it to suffer, even more than that you want it to gain by getting increased attention from clients.

Precision

Another important parameter that leads to a quality translation is precision. This means that when a native of a language into which a translation is done reads a document, he or she considers it to be written directly in that language rather than translated. In order to ensure the precision of a translated document the translator needs to master the respective foreign language to perfection and to know its specific peculiarities.

Deficient Communication

If you collaborate with a “cheap” translator, you assume the risk of publishing grammatically incorrect phrases or even ones that don’t make any sense. Every attempt at external communication will need to be fluid and to transmit accurately the message that you’re wanting to transmit. More than that, if you want to publish on your website catalogs or instructions, your readers to which your communication efforts appear mediocre will not come back as clients or even at all.

Lost Time

As you know, time is money. And believe me; no one wants to lose money. Lost time also means lost energy. Energy which we could better direct somewhere else.

Supplemental Costs

Good, this is just the aspect that interests us most. Bottom line, poor translations will cost more than you negotiated at the beginning. It’s incredible how much a poor translation can be detrimental to your company. In the best-case scenario, you will spend energy fixing errors which can implicate additional costs, or in other words lost profits, while in the worst-case scenario, the translation being poorly done, you will pay another translation office to look over it and correct it. These additional and unforeseen costs, as we all know, will not make you smile.

From here we can conclude that a quality translation can be neither the cheapest on the market nor completed in just a few hours.

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