Has your company lined up the best translation agency for 2019?

If breaking into overseas markets forms part of your company’s 2019 strategy, then it’s time to think about appointing a company to service your professional business translation needs. If you’re new to the world of translation services, then it can be hard to know where to start. However, investing time and energy in finding the best 2019 translation agency now will pay dividends over the course of the coming year. 

Appointing a translation agency – where to start

Finding the best translation agency for 2019 means connecting with a company that can meet your expectations not just in terms of linguistic quality, but also in terms of translation cost and timescales. Good customer service is also an important factor to assess when speaking with potential companies. After all, if a company produces accurate translations but manages to irritate you every time you liaise with its staff team, you’re unlikely to enjoy that particular working relationship. 

The best place to start your search is online. Google “best translation agency 2019” and make a note of the contenders. For each agency, review the specialist skills and expertise that it offers. Many kinds of translation require particular knowledge. This doesn’t just relate to fields like legal translation or medical translation, but also to things like financial translation, which many companies find forms a part of their international expansion plans. Be sure that the agencies you shortlist have the right set of business translation skills to meet the needs of your industry. 

Next, it’s time to read through as many 2019 translation service reviews as you can find. Look out particularly for the most recent ones and for those that relate to the business sector or language pairing(s) that are relevant to you. 

Interviewing translation companies

Next, it’s time to grill the companies themselves. You need to know that they will provide you with high quality, accurate translations that are delivered in time to meet your deadlines, with no exceptions. As such, it can help to ask about how they source and test their translators, how they guarantee their translation quality, if they ever miss deadlines, how their urgent translation services work and how they deal with the situation if any of their translators are off sick. 

It’s also important to ask about additional services. Will you require the agency to provide desktop publishing services, for example, or will you be recreating your own documentation in the new languages? What about if you move to recruiting foreign language writers in 2019 and need someone to proofread their work – will the agency be able to do that too? Asking these sorts of questions at an early stage of the process can help to save you time and money later on.  

Be sure to cover the subject of localization too. A localization company does more than just translation – it reworks the copy in subtle (and sometimes not so subtle!) ways to make sure that it is suited to its new audiences. This can encompass anything from changing distances measured in miles to kilometres, to reworking bits of copy that might offend cultural or religious sensibilities. 

Machine translation 

Finding the best translation agency for 2019 might seem like a time-consuming task, but it is a worthwhile one. Opting to use machine translation may appear to be an easier option, but translations produced by machines are not yet up to the quality of those produced by humans. Human translation accounts for nuance and emotion in a way that machines cannot yet emulate. As such, many businesses that plan to rely on machine translation quickly find themselves scrabbling around at the last minute, trying to find an agency that provides post editing machine translation services. 

For a calmer start to 2019, it might be easier to find the right human translation agency in the first place!

For more information on working with the best translation agency in 2019, you can contact Tomedes.