When a business decides to go global, they may need to translate a wide variety of documents. The question for managers is, how will they handle the translation workload? Having a team of in-house translators or hiring translation companies? This article will help you answer this question.
In-house translators or a professional translation company?
Do you know what a translation company has to do to produce a good translation? We’ve got a long list of steps to take and requirements to meet in doing translations, and I’m sure you’ll be overwhelmed by it. Reach out to us to be told more about this list. And here are some things you might be interested in.
In-house translators
Businesses have to hire qualified translators if they are to translate documents on their own. This is not quite easy as professional translators often want to work for professional translation companies. Even if you’ve managed to assemble a team of translators, there are still concerns:
- Who will manage your team of translators?
- It may cost you more to maintain
- Are they loyal to you?
- Will you train your translators (how?) or let them grow by themselves?
- Your management workload will increase
- Can they do a good job translating every kind of document you have?
- Do your translation needs justify a dedicated staff?
These are just some of the issues I’ve heard from a translation manager at AM Vietnam, who was previously a head of translation for a large company. In fact, requirements of today’s translation industry can give you even more headache if you want to put together a dedicated team of translators for your business.
Which is faster, relying on in-house translators or hiring a translation company?
In some cases, a team of in-house translators will do the job quicker. When you need to translate a few short paragraphs or documents, someone can do it in no time. However, things are different when you have, say, 100 pages of documents to be translated in three days’ time with just 5 translators to hand. It will almost certainly go beyond your control.
That is one of the practical issues that you may face, and there are also many other issues that may make you change your opinion:
- Your employees cannot work 24/7 while translation companies can
- You may need a lot of time to process documents because you don’t have the manpower, but translation companies readily have
- You don’t have a sufficiently professional and up-to-date routine process for your work
- The technology you have at hand is sometimes just PDF readers or the Microsoft Office suite
Only a professional translation agency taking its work seriously can address the above issues effectively.
Quality of translations
The quality of a translation is evaluated according to a host of criteria including accuracy, terminology, consistency and style. Perhaps your staff will be more familiar with some of your criteria such as style and terminology as they’ve done translation work for you. Professional translation companies with experienced staff will nonetheless adapt quite quickly.
At AM Vietnam, we only need a short amount of time to get to know and adapt to a customer’s culture. Translations will be rendered fluently and will satisfy the most rigorous criteria. Admittedly, it is hard to say which is better between a translation done by in-house staff and a translation done by a professional translation company, but one thing you need to keep in mind is that translations done by a translation company will have more consistent quality.
Having in-house translators will save a business money?
Most will agree with the idea that having in-house translators will save a business money, but it’s only true if your translation needs are great enough for your translators to have frequent work. Many businesses also think about recruiting multitasking employees, but this may be the wrong way to go because not everyone can do many things well at once.
All things considered, when opting for a translation company, you can have greater control over your expenses. Instead of paying tens of thousands of US dollars for your staff to translate a few hundred pages of documents, you can pay less and still get the value you want.
Flexibility
You can easily find another translation company if the company you’re working with doesn’t meet your requirements. It’s harder in the case of your staff because you’re bound by employment legislation and your business’ staff policies.
What’s more, thanks to the abundant resources of translation companies, you can also choose the desired translation team. The issues of workload, specialty or complexity are then no longer a headache.
Conclusions
This article is not meant to shape your decision. Our views are here to give you more ideas to make your own decision.
And another thing, what do you think if you can combine the two options: having a translation team and cooperating with a professional translation company like AM Vietnam?