Your business needs to speak to a new market. Maybe there’s a fresh territory that’swaiting to be tapped, or maybe it’s a better supplier who’s in a foreign country.
In either case, one of the big barriers to making the most of new customers or new business relationships in non-English speaking countries is, obviously, language.
The good news is that you’ve done your research and found the right Language Service Provider (LSP)—one that aligns with both your language needs and operational style.
But what exactly does your LSP consider when preparing a project quote? At LinguaLinx, this is one of the most common questions we receive, especially from new clients at the start of our partnership.
We’re always happy to share this information because the more knowledge our client has, the more accurate information they can give us and the more we can help them tackle that new market.
Every translation project is slightly different, but below are the basics of what we look at when we’re quoting a project.
Your LSP will want to know what the languages are. Certain languages are more expensive to translate than others such as Korean, Arabic and many of the Nordic countries.
This can be because of factors like their rarity, which means fewer translators are available, or the cost of living in the countries, so the translators have to account for this in their rates.
The pairing also matters—while translating between English and French or Spanish is fairly standard, finding a linguist capable of translating between Swahili and Kazakh can be much more challenging.
Content that needs translation isn’t just limited to words, it can come in a variety of forms. Just look at your website and you’ll see a number of media types such as:
The more urgent your need, it’s likely the more it will cost.
A bigger team might need to be brought on, or people might need to work unsociable hours and overtime to hit your deadline.
Some industries are more complicated than others, or there are less linguists available who are also subject matter experts.
We always suggest bringing on translators who have a strong track record in your industry so that they understand the terminology, acronyms and jargon.
What’s the final use of the translated material? Is it public-facing and your brand will be judged by it every day, or is it a business requirement that you translate a lot of records that will be archived and rarely accessed?
This will determine how much, if any, of the content can be translated using AI-powered Machine Translation (MT).
Can a lot of it be translated by MT with minimal human post-editing, or can MT be only a minor opening stage with a heavy human touch needed afterwards?
Is this going to be a regular fixture that the LSP can book out linguists ahead of time on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis?
Any advanced planning that you can commit to will help bring economies of scale into play and reduce budgets.
Also, any worthwhile LSP will be help you build a translation glossary or term base. This is a data base of translated material, specific to your business, that they can reuse translated words or phrases for you in future translations.
Are they new employees at an office that understand your business and have context of why they’re reading, watching or listening to content? Or, is it marketing or advertising material that has seconds to resonate with people who know nothing about your company or product?
In the case of the latter, you’ll likely need to transcreate material like advertising slogans. Transcreation is a specialized skill where content is creatively translated.
The focus is on preserving the meaning of the message rather than providing a direct, word-for-word translation.
Those are the building blocks of a quote. What your LSP should really be drilling down into, on top of these, is: how do you want the translation to benefit your business?
If you’re translating web or digital content, do you need to consider things like SEO? Are there certain specific administration requirements you have, like needing to have a project manager available daily for specific hours in a designated time zone?
Is there specific technology, like a CMS or other digital platform, that the LSP needs to consider for a successful translation or integration?
Yes, there are a lot of variables. But hopefully, you can now see that getting an accurate quote from your LSP comes down to them understanding your business and asking the right questions ahead of time.
And the good news is that this responsibility resides with your LSP, not you.
If you’re not partnered with a LSP yet, we’d love to talk to you to see how we can help.
Consultations are free and there’s no obligation.
You’re in safe hands with us as we’re ISO 17100 and ISO 9001 compliant, have over twenty years of professional translation experience, and have earned the trust of organizations around the world.