Best Tips to Keep Your Translation Cost at Bare Minimum
Want to capture global markets? Well, “You need to translate your content” is the advice you get from everywhere. However, to act upon such advice, you have to deal with many financial challenges. Translating content for your international business is going to cost you money, especially if you are targeting multiple marketplaces simultaneously.
Keeping things within budget can be difficult for businesses when they expand into foreign markets. Companies have to adopt certain cost reduction tactics to seamlessly enter a new marketplace. It allows the companies to stay competitive in foreign markets without compromising on quality. In this article, we’ll discuss the best practices that companies can adopt to reduce the translation cost significantly.
How to Keep Your Translation Project on A Budget?
Keeping the budget in control while stepping into a foreign market is very challenging. You never really know how the market would respond to your brand and when you may need to modify your localization strategy entirely. So, the stakes are high and you have to be careful about your finances from the beginning. Here are a few tips that you can use to keep your translation budget in control.
Always Start with Making a Budget
It is important to have a strategic approach toward your financial management as well as translations. You must have a clear idea about how much money you need to put into your translation project, evaluating all possible costs. Depending on your unique translation project goals, you have to allocate your resources accordingly. What type of content you want to translate and which method you are using to translate it also have a huge impact on your project budget. So, make sure that you are analyzing all aspects of your translation project and setting the budget perfectly to meet your project needs without overspending.
Consider Machine Translation Tools
Human translators are quite expensive and if you want to totally rely on them for your translations, it will cost you a great deal of money. So, to keep your translation within budget, you can use the MT tool to create the initial draft of translations that will be proofread and edited by professional linguists later. It will allow you to significantly reduce your translation cost because MT tools can generate quick translation within seconds and they also cost you way less than human translators. However, to maintain high-quality translations, you must post-edit all translation documents by professional translators only.
Use the Latest LSPs Platform
Working through a reliable LSPs platform can make it very seamless and convenient for your translators to manage translation projects. These tools are designed to reduce the project management hassle of your translation teams by eliminating chaos and complicated processes. A professional localization platform helps you optimize your translation workflow and effectively manage day-to-day translation tasks more effortlessly. Every LSP platform has its own unique features; some may provide your integration options and other comes with in-build QA testing. You can always customize your TMS to your translation project needs and add features that will meet your requirements.
Create Brand Glossaries
Creating translation glossaries is also another way of reducing translation costs by preparing terminology documents. So, you can use these glossaries as a style guide and instruction for translators to generate consistent translations. Providing glossaries reduces the risk of inconsistent translation tones and styles that prevent you from doing frequent edits. Indirectly, it also saves your translators’ time, and your overall cost of the translation project is also reduced significantly.
Build A Translation Memory
If you are using a localization platform, for translation project managers, it may have a built-in translation memory feature. It is a great feature that helps you generate quick translations by reusing the previously approved translation from databases. So, if you are an ecommerce business that has to translate similar sorts of content over and over again, having a translation memory would save you time, and you don’t have to spend money on repetitive content translations.
Get On Board Freelancers
There is absolutely no need to hire dedicated full-time translators for your project. Based on your budget, you can always get on board freelance resources for editing and translation purposes. Freelance translators may work on an hourly basis, or you have to hire them on a contractual basis for a specific translation task only. This way, you can carefully watch your expenses and avoid overspending on the monthly salaries of translators. Working with a freelancer is rather cheaper and reduces your oversell translation cost.
Use an Affordable TMS Platform
If you want to go global within budget, make sure to get your hands on an affordable TMS platform. MarsHub is a quite reasonable localization platform to start your globalization journey. It provides super affordable localization and translation project management packages to enterprises, LSPs, and translators. Moreover, it comes with advanced features to cover your overall translation needs under one platform. It also contains a built-in machine translation engine that you can use to generate quick translations in a few clicks.
Final Words!
Managing the financial part of globalization is quite challenging but with the right strategies in place, you can get away with almost everything. As far as translation is concerned, the tips and guidelines provided in this article will help you effectively approach your translation project without getting out of your project budget. It will help you save money and keep things going in the right direction from the beginning till the end.
