2010-07-14 13:35:51 - Despite all the hype about on-line translation, free translation program etc., the truth is, when it comes to promote your business, cheap solutions might end up costing you a pretty penny.

In its points 4.3.1.4. and 4.3.1.5 The EU report on the translation industry (ec.europa.eu/dgs/translation/publications/studies/size_of_langua ..) addresses the issue of the link between price and quality.in the translation business.
Its 426 pages cover lots of technical issues relevant only for the translation service providers, but it also draws attention to the potential high cost of saving money on translations.

One needs to understand the particularity of the translation market. Entry barriers are very low for translation companies so an ever-increasing quantity of individuals and companies are entering the market. The number of qualified linguists, however, is remaining quite stable. Yet, as a consequence of the ever-increasing number of supplier, qualified linguists are facing unfair competition in terms of price, as they have to

compete with unqualified translators ready to work for peanuts.

These cheap translators are providing a service of a quality only marginally better than that provided by on-line translation program, which you can get for free. As long as the translated documents are meant for internal use only, the potential damage to your company is low, unless the poor quality of the translation causes misunderstandings that could lead to costly errors of management.

A direct damage due to cheap translation is the one that results from saving on the translation of your website, for example. It does not matter how much the website visitor is aware of the flaws still plaguing translation programs, when he comes a website that contains spelling, grammatical and/or stylistic mistakes, it automatically creates a negative reaction and might cost your company a large number of clients. If you are investing in driving traffic to your website without investing in turning it into a reliable window to your product or services, you will quickly lose far more than what you saved in translation through diminished ROI on traffic building.

This is especially true when you translating between two languages belonging to different linguistic families, say translating from English to Hebrew for example ( see milatova.com/en/hebrew-translations for more details), as the difficulties in translating are compounded by the structural differences between the two languages, a hurdle that is difficult to overcome for translators and certainly for automated translation programs.

The EU report on the translation industry blames failure of companies to thrive on foreign market to the savings performed on translating the relevant material and indicates that these failures are unfairly blamed on the local management services.

In other words, if your company ever wants to expand in foreign countries, investing in a good, professional and verified translation will go a long way to enable your business to start on a healthy base abroad. On the other hand, if you want to cripple it from the start, by all means, save on the translations!