Manufacturing, no matter your speciality of business or sub industry, is invariably a complex industry that uses plenty of specialist terms.
This means that translation services for businesses such as yours need highly competent translators who are not only well versed in the terms that you use, but are additionally knowledgeable about industry terms in the language you’re translating to.
The things that make a great translation company…
Quality Sector Experience
Experience is important in 3 ways. The translation agency’s length of time in the industry is important, but more so is their experience within the manufacturing industry.
In the former case, a business who has been established for a long time are obviously doing something right; but what they’ve been translating is also massively important. It’s also key to ensure that the translation agency have specific language experience. Every language is slightly different and this leads to a lot of ambiguity in terms as many phrases simply don’t have exact counterparts. With our vast experience and software tools, we’ve become experts in disambiguation!
Services Experience
This leads us to the last experience test – service. Manufacturing is a highly complex industry, involving documents that fall under all sorts of categories, from instructional booklets to safety guidelines for your staff. This could also mean a website translation or brochure translation.
All tasks require slightly different types of translation as they switch from emotive, colloquial and natural language to formulaic and formalised. We’ve found that, although every client is different, translation experience can truly be qualified in this way – so if we’ve done a technical manual in Simplified Chinese for a manufacturing company, we can transpose that experience into different sub-sectors.
Price Vs. Value
Let’s be honest, price is a massive supply factor for your own manufacturing business, and it’ll surely influence your choice of translation agency.
However, choosing your translation company on pricing alone can lead to serious issues and may invariably lead to you spending further money on quality translation services. We’ve helped clients out of a scenario when a translator actually couldn’t understand the literature or simply couldn’t meet a deadline. It’s easy to submit a few Word documents to a few translation agencies and wait for the lowest per-word or document cost but if this was the only way to choose any product – your own manufacturing business would struggle to add value!
Real value comes from professional and accurate translations that help you communicate your brand values. The damage to your reputation through the breaching of regulatory standards can be irrevocable if you choose based solely on price. A sure fire way to arrive at this situation is to use a translation company with pricing that really is too good to be true! You can also be caught out by automated pricing tables and the “unhuman” speed of response – first isn’t always best. Sometimes this speed means that pricing has been done via an automated formula – rather than taking into account the actual requirement and whole translation service. We pride ourselves on having a 30 minute response, but guarantee all of our quotes are done manually – minimising any fluctuations or hidden surprises
Frequency of Your Needs
If your project is particularly large, with ongoing work in the future, ensuring that the company you’ve chosen can consistently meet your needs requires you thinking about their size and staffing capabilities. Larger translation companies will be able to accommodate larger projects and shorter deadlines, so that you can be safe in the knowledge that future projects benefit from assured delivery times.
Look for Great Processes, Accreditations, Testimonials and Insurance
As a market-leading manufacturer – you know all about the importance of processes!
Great translation agencies can give you testimonials, in your sector or task as previously mentioned. They can also explain their processes, and can offer translation memory to give even better value for money (through not replicating the translation twice for recurring terminologies and phrases.)
Accreditations like the ATC and EUATC also reassure you when looking for a translation agency. For the record, we’re members of both!
Professional translation agencies also have professional indemnity insurance in the unlikely event of the translation service causing legal issues.
How We Work…
At Bubbles Translation Services, we have over 3,800 translators speaking over 280 languages. We can take on demanding, challenging manufacturing projects – in fact, we thrive on it!
We work with the biggest and most discerning manufacturing brands in the world to deliver translation services that compel consumers into action.
Our ability to understand and interpret complex documents allows us to relate to your audience – no matter where in the world they are. We have a wealth of experience in translating technical documents and can offer this service for your manufacturing business.
