Hiring Translation Services
When it comes to hiring translation services, it’s essential that you find a trusted professional translation agency with the experience and capabilities to support your business’s unique translation requirements.
But what is a professional translation agency? At Andiamo, we work with skilled and qualified linguists with industry specialisms, to provide clients from a huge range of industries, ranging from medical to automotive, engineering and beyond, with high-quality, accurate translation, interpreting, subtitling, and typesetting services.
To ensure the quality of our work, all of our linguists must pass a rigorous assessment procedure, be members of professional associations such as the ITI or CIoL and all translations go through internal quality control procedures to check their accuracy. Professional translation agencies like ours are also regularly audited and must adhere to industry standards.
Simply put, unlike instant, often inaccurate online translations, and working directly with freelance translators, hiring translation services from a professional agency like Andiamo, provides you with a partner dedicated to not only producing high-quality, accurate translations you can trust, but helping you to meet all your translation requirements and supporting your growth/expansion into new territories.
Professional Translation Services
At Andiamo, we offer a range of translation services:
- Document translation
- Localisation translation (adapting the meaning of a piece of content for a new region)
- Transcreation (adapting a message from one language to another, while maintaining the piece’s intent, style, tone and context)
- Certified translation (translations accompanied by a signed certificate attesting to their accuracy)
- Typesetting (matching the formatting and layout of the source content)
- We also offer a range of other language services including subtitling and consecutive and simultaneous interpreting.
Whether you’re a medical device or automotive manufacturer, software development company, marketing agency, insurance company, or any other small or international business, hiring translation services like ours can help you to provide your IFUs, technical manuals, training materials, brochures, leaflets, packaging, website content or even internal communications in over 140 languages.
The Benefits of Hiring Translation Services
Professional translation services from a trusted agency like Andiamo! have a huge number of benefits over using freelance linguists or AI-based online translation services:
- Translation agencies have a database of skilled, qualified, reliable linguists who are regularly assessed to ensure standards are upheld. Our linguists are university graduates with a background in translation and learning foreign languages or have proven themselves with years of experience in their specialist field.
- At Andiamo, we check all translations in-house and use quality assurance tools to ensure the accuracy and quality of translations.
- Agencies use Translation Memory, which is software used to avoid translating the same content over and over again and to support the consistency of translations. When we analyse a new file, the TM ascertains whether the text has been translated before and identifies matches, for which we offer discounts.
- Hiring translation services from an agency offers you the benefit of end-to-end project management, saving you time researching freelance linguists, liaising with them, and finding someone else to check the translations and format the translated content. At Andiamo, we provide you with a dedicated project manager who will answer any queries you may have and provide updates along the way.
Big Business Benefits
Hiring translation services like ours can also have a number of excellent big business benefits:
- Professional translation services can help you expand into new international markets. For example, we support toy brands to translate the content on their packaging to appeal to foreign consumers in new territories.
- Many businesses rely on translation agencies like Andiamo! to ensure they comply with their industries’ stringent legal requirements. For example, we support a number of businesses to meet their legal requirements by translating their products’ instructional documents and safety information into the local languages of the territories they are sold in.
- Hiring translation services like our website translation service can also help you to attract new international business. By having accurate translations available on-site, you’re more likely to receive business from people in those relevant territories.
Hiring Translation Services VS Freelance Linguists & AI Translation
- While AI models such as Google Translate have become ubiquitous with the word “translation”, they are prone to errors due to the lack of context the user is able to provide, and therefore are not suitable for commercial use.
- AI translation tools struggle to support variations of languages used in different territories, for example, the Spanish spoken in Spain vs Latin America, the French language used in France vs Canada, and the Portuguese languages spoken in Portugal vs Brazil.
- Hiring translation services like ours provides you with quality assurance processes that AI translation models do not. Our translation services are checked by our team of quality checkers to ensure your translation is accurate.
- Free online translation tools can pose a significant security risk, as the content inputted into the tool may not be protected.
- When it comes to transcreation (creative translations), hiring translation services from a professional agency like Andiamo! is essential to ensure your translations read as though they were originally written in the chosen language, rather than clunkily translated into it via an AI translation model.
- Even using skilled freelancers can’t guarantee the quality and accuracy of your translations, and unlike working with a trusted agency, can be time consuming to liaise with and manage.
Finding a Translation Agency You Can Trust
When it comes to hiring translation services, your business can find the perfect language services partner by looking for the following signals of quality and trust:
- Look for ISO standards ISO 9001:2015 (the globally recognised standard for quality management) and ISO 17100:2015 (the globally recognised standard for the delivery of quality translation services). At Andiamo, we have these ISO standards and many more.
- Be sure that your chosen agency is a member of a professional organisation such as the ATC and ITI.
- Check that your chosen agency promotes quality, rather than cheap prices.
How to Prepare When Hiring Translation Services
Before working with a translation agency like Andiamo, it’s important to get your ducks in a row and prepare the information and files your agency will need.
- Identify your available translation budget ahead of time to enable your agency to source the best linguists at the right price.
- Establish the specific regions you’d like to sell into so your agency can ensure your content is translated into the right language variant, for example, the Chinese language spoken in mainland China, Hong Kong or Taiwan.
- If you’re looking for an agency to translate your marketing content, or content that is particularly stylistic, having a style guide to offer is very useful to help your agency match your brand’s voice.
- Try to provide your agency with a final version of your document, rather than a draft, in an editable format such as Word, Excel, InDesign or Illustrator, rather than PDF, as this helps to speed up the process of generating an accurate quote.
What Does Working With a Professional Translation Agency Look Like?
We’ve touched on the process of seeking out and hiring translation services, but what about the process of working with a professional translation agency like Andiamo? We guide our clients through the following process:
- Quotation/estimate based on the project scope, target languages and deadlines.
- You’ll then be assigned a dedicated project manager who will be your main point of contact between your organisation and the agency. Your PM will assess the availability of our linguists and keep you informed throughout the process.
- Our linguists then get to work on your translations. If they have any queries or need to clarify ambiguities, your PM will contact you to gather information and ensure the project runs smoothly.
- Finished translations are reviewed by our other linguists, including native speakers, and quality checked in-house using QA tools to ensure the accuracy and quality of your translations.
- Once checked, our typesetting team then format the translated content to match the source file as closely as possible, before delivering the completed files to you via email.
- Post-delivery, we encourage clients to contact their PM should you have any queries or feedback regarding your completed translation. If it’s our first time working with you, our sales team will be in touch to check that you’re happy.
If you’re currently considering hiring translation services like ours, contact our team today to discuss your requirements and begin your journey with your new partner in translation.
