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8 Smart Strategies on Reducing Your Translation Costs

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8 Smart Strategies on Reducing Your Translation Costs

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You are just about to invest a big portion of your business budget in professional translation services. Great thinking! From increasing your sales and revenue to improving your brand’s recognition and reputation in different markets, translation and localization can have a transformative impact on your business.

But there’s one problem. You’ve done the math. Translation costs are hefty, and you don’t want to break the bank. Luckily, you can still derive the benefits above and reduce your translation costs at the same time. Here’s how.

Plan your localization strategy well & early

When planned for correctly, a localization strategy can help you save big time both in the short term and the long term. Knowing how, where, and when to allocate your efforts and resources, as well as who the right audience to target is and what languages they speak all start here.

We’ve included a list of useful tips for reducing translation costs that you can implement during the strategizing phase:

● Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize. We can’t stress this idea enough. Translating your website or content into 30+ languages at once can prove extremely costly. Therefore, it’s better to start out with the translation languages you’d like to prioritize and go from there.
● Similarly, it’s not necessary to make all your existing content available in those languages immediately. Or ever, for that matter. Set out to translate the content that’s likely to make the most impact with your audience, such as your website, brand messaging, and information surrounding your services and products.
● Plan the content’s volume. See if you can cut down the amount of text, so you can minimize the translation cost per page you will have to pay. Leave intact only the most important information that’s actually relevant to your readers.
● Finally, define your deadlines early, and make sure they are doable and realistic (if in doubt, just ask!), as last-minute translation orders can get significantly more expensive.

Make your content files translation-friendly

Before you hand over any of your texts to be translated, check to see if your content is of high enough quality in the first place. Truth is, translators can’t work their magic with your texts if those are ridden with grammatical mistakes, typos, or confusing information.

To optimize your content and improve its suitability for translation, you might have to remove redundant copy, simplify complex sentences and remove technical jargon. By doing so, the source text will become easier to understand, and you guessed it… translate! That will bring the amount of work required by the translators down.
Finally, send only editable files and avoid PDFs. Given the nature of such documents, the translators will need to extract the text strings for translation manually, and that additional cost will be on you.

Prioritize the quality of your translations

If your goal is to achieve high-quality translations –which it clearly should be– then you need to seek experienced translators that are also native speakers and experts in your industry. However, these translators are not cheap.

Although it might sound counterintuitive at first, relying on the power of translators that have refined their translation skills can actually be your most cost-effective option! Think about it. Your goal with your translated content is to engage and build trust with the new market, which will lead to making sales. Only laser-focused and error-free translations can produce this powerful effect.
On the other hand, going for the cheapest translators or translation services you can find might do your brand more bad than good. Your target audience won’t be particularly happy coming across errors on your website or blog. There’s a chance that this could lead to bad PR, and in the worst case scenario, you might become a laughing stock on twitter! This can be quite expensive to rectify, not to mention time-consuming. (Time is money after all.)

Leverage translation technology

With translation technology, translators can increase their productivity and thus significantly reduce the amount of time and effort required to complete projects.

When choosing a language service provider, watch out for the types of translation technology tools they’re using. The more efficient the better. That can mean not only better quality work, and thus more sales in the long-term, but also reduced short-term costs. Plus, earlier time to market for your products and services can have a directly positive impact on your bottom line too.

Here are our top recommended translation tools for reducing your translation costs:

Cat tools

Computer-assisted tools (CAT) split content into segments to make them easier to translate, thus enhancing the efficiency and speed of the translation process. Oftentimes, CAT tools come with built-in quality assurance and translation memory (explained below), which mark potential translation errors and inconsistencies.

Empowered by CAT tools, translators can work through your translations quicker and deliver higher quality translations.

Translation memory

The purpose of translation memory is to boost the consistency of translated text. It’s also every translator’s favourite time-saver (meaning your new favourite money-saver, too).

As the tool’s name suggests, translation memory stores previously translated text segments into its database. When a translator gets down to work, the software makes translation suggestions based on this previously stored data, flagging the text as either a perfect match or a fuzzy match.

For instance, let’s say that a translator has previously translated a sentence from English into German. In the event that the translator encounters the exact same sentence in the future, translation memory will recognize it as a perfect match with the previously translated sentence in the database.
As you can tell, this can reduce translators’ work significantly. Translating your content with the same translation service on a consistent basis could result in significant long-term savings for your business.

Pangea Global – translation services on your cost-saving mission!

Being strategic, prioritizing quality over quantity and choosing your translation provider wisely are some of the best ways for you to reduce your translations costs.

Here at Pangea Global, our prices are amongst the most competitive in the professional translation and localization space. With our 900+ native-speaking, industry expert crew and cutting-edge translation tool stack, not only can you save money, but also reach levels of translation quality you didn’t know were possible. Contact us today!

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