Picture the scene; the ‘powers that be’ have cut your budget for translation services but you still need that 5,000 word sales proposal translated by next week…and the clock is ticking.
Sound familiar? Here at Translation Empire we work in partnership with our clients so we can really understand your ‘pain points’ and get to grips with the latest obstacles you may face.
Getting your translation projects completed to a high quality standard and delivered on time is a given, right? We all expect that to happen when working with a translation agency.
But what about continuously reducing your translation spend over time – OR even better – how about being able to have your projects delivered before your deadline?
Sound good? Great! So let’s carry on.
Our project managers and pool of over 3500 translators; use the latest computer aided translation (CAT) tools to turnaround our clients projects quickly and maintain consistency of translation quality. They also help them to reduce spend where possible without impinging on the quality of service.
The key to accessing these service benefits is through the use of translation memory.
But what is a translation memory?
Essentially translation memory is a database of linguistic terms, more commonly known within the industry as a TM.
Our professional translators access the TM resource to leverage previously translated words and segments of text during the translation process of a current project.
This is how we can reduce your cost per project and also deliver quicker whilst maintaining the overall translation consistency.
So will translation memory be useful for your projects?
In theory translation memories can benefit any type of translation project you have. However In reality, translation memories offer the best results when used for translation projects that consist of lots of repeated or semi-repeated sentences and phrases.
This means that TM can be most useful when applied to projects such as:
- Instruction or user manuals
- Product catalogues
- Websites – especially Ecommerce where many aspects of an item’s description remain the same – such as colour & size.
- Content that is regularly repeated such as company newsletters, web content updates and monthly/quarterly reports.
- Technical manuals or documents that have large word-counts tend to also consists of repeated segments of text.
There are three main reasons for you to work with an agency that use CAT tools and translation memory; these are:
Reduce your spend on translation services over time
If you have translation requirements that often have similar content such as repeated sentences and phrases. We can use translation memory to store already translated text and then recognise this previously translated text before ‘pulling out’ relevant sections from the TM to insert into a new translation project.
Translation memory cost-reduction benefits are calculated on the basis of how much a segment of previously translated text matches the new text. And hence what leverage it offers in relation to a percentage discount off the charge for a project.
The industry standard method to do this is via a percentage match. Generally translation memory is broken down into distinct categories which are:
- Context matches
- 100% matches
- Fuzzy matches
- Repetitions
The closer the match of previously translated words and new text, the less the charge per word will be. The up-shot of this is a decrease in costs on your future translations.
Consistently high-quality translations every time
Our translation memory offers further benefits that help maintain the quality of your translated output.
If you can imagine – a translator receives a large project to translate 20,000 words for a companies’ annual financial report. There is lots of similar or repeated text and therefore a translator will find it is very time consuming and laborious to continuously scroll back and forth through the document to maintain consistency of the translation throughout.
This is where translation memory comes into play. By highlighting similar segments or repetitions of previously translated text; the report’s style, tone and terminology remain consistent.
Ultimately this means you have assurance of high quality translation output each and every time.
Faster turnaround time and delivery of projects
As you work with us over a sustained period of time – simultaneously you will be building up a valuable repository of your previously translated text.
The more content you add to your Translation Memory, results in less words that the translator has to translate. Naturally this means the project will be completed quicker and delivered by or before your deadline.
If you would like to find out how our CAT tools and Translation Memory offerings can benefit your organisation; please feel free to contact us via the form below and one of our translation team will be in touch.