Your business is expanding into new territories, and with new territories come new opportunities and, quite often, new language requirements. Your website - your brand’s digital shop window - needs to be translated to enter these new markets.
But why would you hire a Language Service Provider (LSP) to translate it rather than a freelance translator? Or Karen in accounts payable, who is fluent in Spanish and already on the payroll? Because the one thing we do know is that no one, absolutely no one, would dream of just copying source text and running it through Google Translate…right?
In the short term, there’s a higher investment going with an LSP, so how do you justify the decision? The simple answer is by looking to the long-term. By treating this decision in the same way you’ll likely consider other business decisions and partnerships; as a strategic pillar of your long-term strategy.
At LinguaLinx, we’ve been there to partner with businesses and help them through their website localization as they step forward into new markets. We’ve also been there to help out businesses that decided to go down the freelance translator route and were stung by the consequences.
Of course, we know it’s not an easy decision to commit the time and resources to projects of this scale. Your budget has to be scrutinized and minimized wherever possible.
In this article, we’ll look at why the right decision for translating your website is to partner with an LSP so that you’re looking at strengthening your business with a view to the long-term.
Translating a website or digital platform has its own unique challenges. Experience counts, and the chances are an LSP with digital translation capabilities as part of its arsenal has seen it all before. If an issue comes up, they’ll know how to deal with it.
Even better, you have someone looking out for you who can be proactive, so issues can be flagged even when they are just minor issues and avoided altogether.
Hand-in-hand with the experience, an LSP brings expertise in technology to the table. Sometimes translating a website is simple and doesn’t need any tools other than a decent workflow and Microsoft Word.
But sometimes (more often than not actually) as websites increasingly become back-end complicated commerce hubs, there’ll be specialist tools and project management software needed (such as Plunet). An LSP will have all of this nicely in place.
A freelance Portuguese translator might do a great job translating your site into Portuguese. At the end of the project, they’ll understand your business perhaps as well as an LSP would.
But now the Spanish market is where the next opportunity is and you need a Spanish version of your website. Now you have to source a Spanish translator and the whole education process about your business starts from scratch, taking your time (which is money) and focus away from the other aspects of your business.
With an LSP, the learning curve of getting to know your business happens only once.
You’re dealing with one central team for all of the languages, not trying to project-manage a series of individual freelancers who are likely based in different parts of the world.
This central team, your LSP partner, understands the translation and localization industry and can guide you through it.
Do you really want to learn how to manage a digital translation project in Arabic? Didn’t think so.
A good LSP will have long-term (there’s that word again) relationships with a large number of freelance translators. They’ll have done the vetting for you and only use qualified translation professionals who have a good track record not just in translation, but with that particular LSP.
After all, you might have found the Mozart of German translation, but if it’s like trying to work with a hung-over Mel Gibson, then you’re best off looking elsewhere. And unfortunately, you probably won’t know this until it’s too late.
This goes back to knowing your business - now that you’re in these new markets, there’s a good chance there’ll be other translation, interpretation, or localization needs.
With an LSP, you have that experience at your fingertips and a trusted partner who can guide you through any foreign language project from transcreating your marketing and advertising to supplying qualified interpreters for business meetings.
You’re not relying on one individual who, if something happens to them personally, would bring the translation to a grinding halt.
You’re working with a business that has procedures, support personnel, and a chain of command in place to keep any project running consistently despite any unforeseen changes to the team.
Your translation may look great, but what if it’s wrong? Not totally wrong, obviously, but 15% wrong, or 5% wrong, or even 2% wrong…is that acceptable?
And how would you know that this was the case? Probably when it was live in the marketplace and you started getting feedback from ex-customers who are now going to your competitors who localized their website properly showing they care about their customer's native language.
LSPs live and die on their ability to provide a strong quality assurance (QA) review process. This often involves multiple qualified translators and language experts. Now, what individual translator is going to give you their competitor’s name and suggest you get in touch with them to double-check their translation?
Ultimately, the difference is that you’re walking into a partnership where there is a company looking after your best interests as your language requirements adapt and change. You’re partnering with experienced professionals who do this day-in, day-out.
You’re partnering with a LSP that will give you the security that once you’ve delegated the project to them, you can get back to the day-to-day running of your business. You’re partnering with a company that wants to be in a mutually beneficial relationship with you for, yep, you guessed it, the long-term.
As you can tell, there are a lot of factors to consider when choosing the best language service provider to help translate your website. But now you also know the many benefits of working with one.
If you’re thinking of translating your website, we’d love to chat with you about your translation needs.
With LinguaLinx, you won't ever have to worry about your message getting lost as it’s translated into multiple languages across your website. You know you're in good hands with our ISO 17100 and ISO 9001 compliance twenty years of professional translation experience, and the organizations whose trust we've earned.