Translating the Translation Industry: Finding Translators, Tools & Tips

1. Introduction: Whether you've got a brochure to translate or an entire website, you are going to need a translator or translators yours or an entire translation agency to help you get the job done. Now along the way, there are a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong, for costs to escalate and for mistakes to be made. That's what this class is intended to help you avoid. I put this class together because I want to give you a solid understanding of the translation industry, how it functions, the tools, technologies terminologies the basics so that when you go forward with your project, no matter what it is, you know how to speak with vendors, how to find vendors, how to prepare your projects a little bit better and how to get the job done quickly and cost effectively. Now this class isn't gonna teach everything. It's It's a 101 introductory course, and I plan to have a deeper dive classes later. But this will get you off to a good start and quick start, and by the end of it, you should be ready to go out and begin your search for a vendor. So let's get started 2. Translating the Translation Industry: now, I first must confess that I am not a translator. However, years ago I worked for a translation agency, and during that time in the years after, I have learned a lot about the industry. I've worked with benders, translation and localization vendors, and I've worked with many, many clients, and I as a consultant that kind of fall in between these two and I, and I feel like what I spend a lot of my time doing isn't in fact, translating. What I'm doing is translating the translation industry, which seems rather odd. But when you start to dive into this industry, you can see why it needs translators. There's a lot of terminology, and I'm gonna touch on some of the basics right now to get you started. And don't worry if they don't sink in right away during the course of this class, I think they will. And of course, you can always ask me one on one later. So first and just brought concepts about the industry. Their first off, It's a lot. It's a big industry. Their translators all around the world, many, many thousands of translators, individual translators and then translation agencies, which rely on many translators. And then, of course, there are clients. Big companies like Microsoft or Google or well, you name it and they have in house translators, and they also rely on out outside translators, and that leads me to my next point. Most translation is outsourced. Even though large companies often have translators who work full time within the company. They will also often trend outsource work with freelance translators or outside agencies that work with freelance translators. That's just the nature of the business. There's a lot of languages out there and a lot of volume, and you just to manage the demand and the and the range of languages. The demand spikes up and down in volume of translation. You generally need a structure that allows you to work, rely on freelancers. Also, many large companies will rely on multiple vendors that they do so often because of volume and sometimes also just because they want to keep their vendors and check in to keep you keep him all hungry, and by having multiple vendors, you you have a better so you can better manage quality and better manage volume spikes on. So if you have a lot of volume or to increase volume. You'll find that you may have multiple vendors as well, and that's not a bad thing. Benders were used to it. Word Count is gonna come up a lot when you deal with vendors, and word count really is the work. Count off whatever you're having translated it. It's the currency of the realm, so to speak. It's how they how they pay for translators, freelance translators and freelance editors there. They're charging by the word count now that this is an old model and it's and it is changing. To some degree, it's evolving. But fundamentally it comes down to a word count, and that's that's what you'll be assets. When you start to budget internally, it's something you're going to need to know about your whatever it is you're you want translated and change order is a term that can bite the term used in the industry for changes that you make it the last minute or after you've sent content to be translated on, and if you have some source content that's changed you, you certainly send that out, he said. Well, we changed the sentence or two. It's no big deal. Well, it is a big deal once the agency has started to translate it. So what they do is they create these change orders. These change orders could be quite expensive over time. So that so that also something to keep in mind that when you start to work with vendors, you have to be disciplined as well. You have to be a good client. You want a good vendor, but you also have to be a good client. And finally on. I think the most important point is your vendor, your agency or your individual translators that you work with. They're not just your global voice, their your ears and eyes. They can provide a lot of information about these markets and audiences that you're trying to succeed with on. I think there are opportunities that are often lost when clients simply say this is what I want translated and they send it off and just send it back to me. And don't ask me the questions. Don't bother and don't waste my time. Just get the job done. You could. You could work that way with the vendor, but you're missing opportunities because you're translators Sometimes you live in the target country. Sometimes they don't. They can provide a lot of intelligence. They can give you feedback on the content. They instead of just asking questions they can. Actually, you could say, Hey, what do you think of this? Do you think this? What do you think of the packaging? What do you think of the brand name? What do you think? What's the environment like? I know it's not gonna It's not. It's purely anecdotal, but sometimes anecdotal information could be extremely valuable. And definitely when it comes from your translator for translators confused by the texture sending him or her, then odds are you might not be creating the best text from the get go. So these were some of the concepts that you should start to internalize as you as we go forward. And now let's dive into some of the terminology that you're going to deal with. M. L V stands for multi language vendor, and that is generally a translation agency. They generally, when you hire translation agency or generally hiring them to handle many, many of different languages. If you hire just one translator and generally individual translators handle to a language pair, their their their native language and then one other language. Sometimes translators can handle more than that, but more often that than not, it's one language pair, French to English, French, two German and so forth. These are singling SLV single language vendors, and so an MLB can contract out to a lot of freelance SL base. And that's kind of how that that works. L 10 n r stands for localization, and that's an L with an end at the end and then 10 letters in between. It is it's called a numeral I A. It's a very geeky ah, abbreviation, if you will. But you're going to see it a lot because localization is really what these agencies do. Uh, and what they're not just translating. They're doing something a little bit more significant, which is localization. And it's something I talked about in my introductory class, and I talk about in a number of classes. So just be aware of l 10 an artist localization and then internationalization. And this is also in a important prop part of the process that these large agencies provide as well, Um, l s P language service professional or provider. That's a term that that's got a lot of weight these days. You'll see. They used a lot of swell. It's just another word. Uh, Teoh, you know, clients generally think translation agency. They don't think localization agency, and they often don't think l S P. But as you start to get into the industry, you're going to see a lot of these abbreviations. Just be aware of them. They often mean the very, very similar things. Now, when you start to send out languages, you're going to see these thes acronyms, Figs, which is an old acronym, which stands for French, Italian, German, Spanish. When when companies would would go into Europe, they would say, I want to support fix which of some of the core languages for that market Now, of course, that's not going to get you all of Europe by any stretch. But it is historically been a popular four language combination and then in Asia of C. J K Chinese Japanese Korean brick is relatively new that that comes from, uh, focus on emerging markets, and that's been popular. And then there's Fig SP, which is figs plus Portugal, Portuguese for Portugal, There's a lot of these thes, thes, funny looking acronyms. Just be aware that they're out there. They're don't they're not. You know, when people when you work with sales wraps and odds And when you start to put our FPs request for proposals out to agencies, you might see a lot of this lingual of these. This terminology might hear a lot of it from the sales rep. Just, you know, just be prepared if you have any questions. If you don't understand something, always ask pushback. Don't be afraid of sounding naive, because by the end of this class, you won't be anyway. But sometimes some agencies don't do it well, a good enough job of educating their clients. And so they move quickly. They, they, they they don't explain things. So so ask them to explain that. And I mentioned language bears the way they're often visualized is with the carrots, eats the little doodads so English to French means I'm going one direction and translated from English to French or I'm going back and forth between English French, a bi directional translation so that you'll see that a lot in Queen you master quotes on and you received quotes back, so there's some terminology. And now that we've gotten some of the basic terminology over with, we're gonna move on to work for us. You understand how all of this fits together? 3. Translation Workflow: So now I'd like to take you through a high level view of how translation works historically and where it is, where it is now and where it's evolving towards. We're kind of in an in between phase, Still ongoing. First show you the traditional translation workflow model. And it begins here with you, the client and you have you find a translation agency. And within that translation, see, you have a project manager PM and this is your key contact within the agency. This person manages all of the work phone. And historically, there was quite a lot of sending and receiving the files. The PM van works with the freelance translators, translators and editors. Now you will create something. Ah, file. Historically give up. It probably be a word document. Your brochure, for example, on this would be if it was in English, it this would be the source language, English, and so you'd have your source document. You take that and you would send it to the translation agency and the PM then would take that file and send it to as many translators is require. Across is May languages that that you need support it and Then those translators send it back to the PM into the PM, might look at it and then send it to another round of editors on. And so it cycles back and forth, and then eventually the final translated document goes back to the PM, and then it that PM since back to you and then becomes known as your target target language . You could have multiple target languages, see of English source and then French target German target and so forth. Now you can understand that with the each language pair and with each file, the workflow in terms of just emailing files back and forth could be significant. And it was significant for many years. And it still is if if you tend to work this way of sending files back and forth and there's no reason you can't work this way. But just as we now have Google docks and we have Office Cloud and everything is in the cloud well, now we have cloud based translation. So just like if you've used Google docks, you know that you can create something in the cloud and then share it with everyone so that you're not actually emailing a file. You're emailing a link to a file. That's kind of how it works now with translation workflow. So there's you with your file, you have your freelance freelancers and then you've got your agency, the PM at the agency. And then what you do is you send that file gets uploaded into this platform, this club based translation platform, and there's many of them out there. And then all of these players work on the through the platform. So you and I have the file. The content stays within this database, and it is translated there, and then the content when it's translated into all the target languages, can then be dumped or uploaded or migrated to your website to a mobile app or mobile website, or to a brochure so that the content still that season stays in a central location. And all of the vendors You all work off off this common platform, and I'm gonna take you through a few of these platforms as we go forth. Now this is high level. There are many, many details that that you should be aware of Askew. Start to to embark on your translation journey, such as you're going to need to create a terminology. Glossary on this is terminology unique to your company and your products and your industry , and there might actually be glossaries out there available that you can leverage based on your industry. And I'm gonna touch on that in a few moments. Uh, you also want style sheets style sheets based on how you want content translated style of the translation. How things should be written Teoh to enhance consistency. Consistency is very, very important on, and you're going to see why I can add up to know it's not only good from out from a style perspective and good from a usability perspective, but it it can save you a lot of money, because if you tend to, uh, repeat consistent terms and consistent phrases on, there are a lot of phrases on websites that are just repeated. Uh, that you don't have to translate that again and again and so get reused and recycled. And by doing so, you save money on translation. You're also gonna want to have a process in place for reviewing the work of your vendors to and relying on people that can provide a level of proof, reading or just quality checks, and that could be partners in your countries and the target markets. Uh, could be customers. You might have a few key customers you can chime in. You can recruit them. Ideally, it's employees that work within those markets. But if you're smaller company, you're gonna have to be a little more creative. But you do need to have a process in place for verifying that everything is is. It looks, reads and feels correct. Also the visuals, course visuals and audio visual files and podcasts and anything that you are putting onto your website, or that if you're doing your website or or an application, you have to think about that as well. Because not everything that is translated is pure text. In a word document it is, it is. It might be text embedded within an illustrator file or text in a in a video or spoken dialogue, and and that stuff could be very, very expensive and were complicated to translate or localize. And then finally, most importantly, perhaps, what about all the features and functions? So if you're doing a website, this is where the heavy lifting really comes. into play. You have a search engine, perhaps on your website. Does it handle all the different languages you have? E commerce? While that opens a lot of complexity in terms of currencies and and just the functionality in each target market sizes and dimensions and delivery and tracking of deliveries air messages, something is often overlooked on websites and applications. Your database. You've got a customer database, for example, while customer names aren't always coming in one script. And if you saw one of my really classes, I talk about scripts and languages on. So someone from China, my use it oven script and can your database handle that? And even if your database can handle it, who's gonna read that and understand that person's name? So there are a lot of details that you need to consider before you even get toe to bring in the vendor, because your vendor will certainly raise these questions as well if they're good vendor. So just a few of the key details you've got a high level view of workflow, and now we're gonna move into Mawr off the process of translation and some of these tools that you can leverage to to make your process more efficient and effective 4. Translation Tools: OK, now let's get into tools, translation tools and there are a lot of them out there. I am only going to scrape the surface of what's available to you. So don't consider this the end all what I'm gonna try to do. It's just give you an understanding off One way a few ways, you might work with some of these tools and understanding of the of the general tools and cells. New acronym Cat Stands for Computer Computer Aided Translation It's a It's an old term, and it goes back to the old days of translation, and what I have here is a screenshot from off STL Toronto's and before it was STL tratos, it was just known as Trotz Trot does created a tool for translators and agencies that allowed you to take files and manage them in a way that was more efficient. And, as you can see here, if you look closely, you'll see this. There are two columns here. There are, uh, text segments in English and text segments in French, and they are aligned basically. So the process here he's is one of taking a lot of text on breaking into segments, which often senses sentence a segments and then aligning the segments with source into source and target pairs. And it seems very tedious. But with computers, it can actually go quite quickly. And what happens is when you load these files he's word documents, if you will, or were XML documents into the software, it automatically scans that and looks for pre matched segments because, as I mentioned previously, when you're dealing with a lot of text, corporate text, website text, there's a lot of repetition. Your slogan, your company slogan, the boiler plate text in the footer. Uh, you name it. There's a lot of repetition. So if you have repeating these text segments and you've pre match that with the target segment that you know has been well translated, that saves a translator time and ultimately is going to save you money. Now this is old software. It's been around for a while, and it's now Cloud based is well, and I'm gonna take you through that in a second. But, Angie, as as translators go through this and they align the source and target text segment by segment, this could beat. This is safe, and when you develop over time to something known as a translation. Memory translation Memories are are basically large databases off previously text translated segments that with time at value, and it really can add significant die. It's like a bank account that pays interest because, as you and use your pain for translation paid by the word. So it's important that when you've translated text that you can recycle it and and by doing so, you're also, um, improving consistency. But the important thing about translation memories, you have to make sure it's well maintained, meaning that it's always used and use properly by professionals on. And also, you might have separate trance separate translation memory databases. Often a marketing team might translate text a certain way while your legal department is gonna be translating much differently. And there's gonna be a lot more legalese and less room for error. Where marketing might you know, my mix it up a little bit more. It's There's a term called trance creation that's used a lot of marketing where there's a lot of copyrighting brought into the process of translation. So you often large companies often have many different types of memories. Translation memories. Um, And then once you have your tm your translation memory, you can then use this to Tran to educate or to optimize your machine translation engine. And if you have been with me in previous classes, I've talked about machine translation Google. Of course, Google translate is the largest machine translation on the planet, but there are many of them and they they don't do a great job. But if you can train with previously translated strings across a certain industry sector, they can actually be quite effective. And the savings you're going to see over time and the way it works is based on match type. So if you have 100% match for a text segment, the translator or agency will give you a certain discount, um, and it. And if the match is between 85 99% you get that discount. If there's no matches, you're paying full rate for your translation. But the point is, the more matches you have, the larger your memory. Over time, you're gonna you're gonna end up translating less and less text and saving money. I lost to go faster. It'll be more consistent. They'll be less room for error. So So really, even the translation memory sounds very cumbersome. It doesn't have to be. And in fact, with the latest versions of a lot of these cloud based translation platforms, you're going to see that it's just built right in, and it's really unobtrusive. So what I'm gonna do briefly is taking through one such platform. And it is known as I call it Matey Cat. Because I like matey. But it made cat is well, it is an open source translation platform meeting. Uh, it is maintained by a company. Uh, that benefits because it has a business model behind it, but it is free for you. Two years. And so I have created a personal account here. I'm just going to add a file here toward dockets. See Gettysburg Address. And it's my first imports to document. And then I and I know what our first course want. I should name it, Of course. Maybe, uh, Getty's And I want to go English to French. It's a general. Select a subject. I'll just a general. But you can see here by by narrowing down to a specific industry sector, the platform could do a better job with with translation and then here you've got TM in glossary so you can you can have a glossary already imported that you've developed and your translation memories could be important. So this is where the value of creating translation memories and a terminology glossary. This is where the value is realised. So let's analyze this file and it shouldn't take too long, and it's crunching it right now. It it, uh, it's got a total word count 278 industry. And you can because there's been some matches you can save a little on here, so I could actually, uh, translate it and what this is, where the business model comes. And I could outsources right away to a freelance translator. And so and this would be the 20 year olds to have that down, which, you know you can seek. Break how this could be an expensive business. This is just one language pair, and it's very few words. Imagine if you've got 10,000 words into a dozen languages. That's why this industry is a big industry, and that's why translation is expensive. And that's why translation memories can really, really go a long way into saving money for you, so I don't want to outsource it. If the notice is an or here, I can open the job or I can outsource woman, open it the job. And we're going to see how the language pairs air work, work. So here it's actually using Ah, Michelle. Bit of mange machine translation and matching on. You see the empty right here to provide to provide a target translation. Now, if I'm a translator, I can go in here and I can I could tweak it. I can improve it, Uh, and and you can just keep going Text string by treks ring. So I translated. Consider that translated. So I move on to the next segment translated, translated and so forth, and you can see how well this works. It's it's very efficient. It's Web based. I can I can have other people my freelancers uses on. Then I can review it on, and we just, you know, just work right through this. This is what the translator would do, just kind of tweak it. The editor And I don't I don't think I mentioned that with translation. It's usually not just one translator. There's a trip at a minimum. There's a translator and then an editor and then editor as a translator who at its the initial translators work. It's usually someone with, ah, lot more expertise, usually more industry specific expertise. They charge a little less for editing, usually because it's not pure translation. And then there's a project manager on top of that. But then I can I can then download the translation here, and this is just a very high level view of one platform. But it should give you a feel for for how you might go ahead, translating a document and working with with freelancers. Now if it was a website I wanted translated, I'm gonna look for something worse sophisticated a platform where I can export HTML files out and have those translated, uh, in a such a certain way that those html the code doesn't get mess with by the translators so that that brings me to a whole another level off platforms. There are a lot of them out there. I'm gonna talk to talk to a bit more about those in the next segment, but this should give you a good feeling for how software and the cloud based software could help you managed translation, manage quality and and hopefully save money along the way. 5. Finding and Hiring Translators: So you want to find Ah, translation localization vendor. Where do you begin? You could do a Google search, and that's certainly one way to start, But I'm gonna suggest two other avenues. First one website if you're looking for freelance translators, pros dot com is a great resource. They've been around for many years and there are a lot of translators on there, and you can really, uh, dive down if you're a lot of small. Companies want often hire translators directly. They don't necessarily go to a translation agency, and there's a reason for that. The translation agency has project managers they have overhead as well, and that over it gets the project. Management feeds add to the total cost of the job. So if you're a small company, you might say, Well, project manage ourselves, at least initially, and will outsource to the translators. And when you do that, you've got to find translators and testing to qualify them yourself. Prose is one good outlet. Another one is the American Translators Association. It's a it Z every not every, but most countries have Professional Translator Association's. Most are general majority or quite credible and have directories and This is a fine directory. You could use a swell for looking up the translator. There's also Resource is for for hiring translators. There's a lot to digest, but it's important to start to digest it. Because as you start to go global and to start to translate content, the more you understand the industry and the the way translators work, speak how they find work and how they present themselves to you. Uh, better a buyer you'll be as you go forward now, a few vendors Now, if you if you just want a hand it off to a vendor. Uh, I've written a book about that, but there are there here, some large ones, the two largest to the tune of some of the largest or STL dot com and line bridge dot com. Very large vendors. They also have cloud, please cloud based platforms as well. We localize another large vendor. Erickson you to have just a few. I'm really just touching the surface of some of the vendors that I'm aware of. I'm aware of considerably more, but I'm not gonna overwhelm you. This is where Google can come in, of course, as well. But the key fruit with finding a vendor is definitely looking for a vendor that that matches your industry matches the size of your jobs. If if you if you only have a few 100 words into one language, you probably aren't going to send a test yell because they want that they deal with large clients, hundreds and thousands of words up 200 or more languages. Uh, you might find a smaller might work with a freelancer initially, ideally, and then and then build up from that. But when you start to have serious volume across serious number of languages, a vendor is gonna come in very valuable, unless you want to have a full time person project manager in house to do this now, another way, Now that you confined benders is you're going to actually work through the platform itself . So cloud that I mentioned matey cat or made cat and you saw it are one out. If if if I chose the outsource option, it immediately presented a vendor and a freelancer s. So there's that. But there's some other platforms as well. To be aware of this is not not comprehensive at all, but here are a few, and I'm gonna actually show you. Ah, smart cat. Briefly is well here. Uh, so let's take a quick look here. Smart cat. Very popular platform. And you can see you can kind of see where they sit just from their home page in terms of the ecosystem, if you will. They market themselves to translation agencies to the freelancers, a linguist and then companies that that higher thes people. So, for for you, if your client, um, this would allow you to find your vendor to man Teoh, help you with translation management and so forth. So I I've set up a an account here, and you can do that as well. Just get a feel for so you log in. And this is starting to look kind of similar now to what I went through earlier. Uh, with with mate Cat, you would upload a document to create project. Let's try getting spurred again and see and see what happens here. I hope. Let me go back here. I don't have a translation. So it is. You're going to see a lot of these terms. Um, subject. Uh, gosh, let's just say arts and culture, uh, deadline. It consent my deadline to Grieg's source language. Shortcut this to English. I'll say I want to do French. And do I want to use machine translation, you know. So that's fascinating. Seeing machine translations being used, Azan. Interesting aside. Machine translation. The vendors, uh, in translators. Houston, Just bash it. Uh, horribly so in 10 years ago, Eight years ago? Even a few years ago. Ah, and they still do to some degree. But you can see that they have embraced that. The vendors have embraced that the platform providers have embraced it because it does accelerate workflow, and it makes translators jobs easier. It also, frankly, I find machine translation democratizes translation to a large degree. I it, uh I use it. I use Google. Translate a lot. I think I know a lot of people do. It translates billions of words a day, and it teaches it unlocks content. But I think what it also does is it teaches the importance of professional translation because it's not professional translation. It is a just translation. So it's useful. But is it the bite? By using machine translation, you start to realize when you're gonna when you're going to need a professional, uh, to to handle this so you can see here, not created this project. I'm asking for translation There. Different tests I mentioned. There's a translator, editor, perforating post entity. There's different stages that you can You can different process stages for the text along the way that you can ask, uh, people to play a role in helping you. So anyway, so this platform, I've started it. I'm not going to take you through the whole thing, but it's actually very intuitive. It'll and see the team is interesting because here you can add project managers on and you can add a project manager. You can invite colleagues freelancers to have access to the file. Uh, resource is is where he would upload your glossaries, your translation, memory and, of course, payments. You're gonna have to que eso. It's just it's a nice platform. It it gets you. It helps keep everything in the cloud seen by everyone. And it's just a really thinks this is the way things were done, General, and I I really recommend that if you're if you're just getting started, you look for a cloud based solution and build from there three idea of sent sitting files back and forth. You could do it, I but its its not if for one, often might work. But most organizations want are gonna. Once you start to do this, you're gonna keep doing it. It may feel like a one off initially, but it's a never ending journey. So with that, we're going to next move on to the bottom line, which, of course, is money and how much it's gonna cost. And you can see here payment is absolutely part of the process, and you'll start to need Teoh to deal with. If you have a freelancer, how are they going to chart? How much you gonna pay? And, um, how do you budget for all this? It's, uh it's not trivial, so we'll get to get to that next. Thanks. 6. Budgeting for Translation: the bottom line. Money companies like Microsoft, Google and others spend millions of dollars annually on translation because they're managing 100 plus languages and a lot of content across those languages. It's not a trivial amount of money, so the budgeting process for translation is hugely important. You need to have a solid understanding for for how much translation costs and where the money goes. This visual here gives you just kind of a high level of you. It's don't get too hung up on the actual cost because it costs a little dated here. But it should give you an understanding of how the pricing works at the bottom. Here, you've got, say, a freelance translator charges between five and 10 cents a word. Um, and this or a single language vendor now see, I've got I've broken it off, broken it down so we could have a single language vendor that outsources to freelancers say English to Spanish. So I'm a SLV company, and then I've got 100 freelancers. They charged me between five and 10 cents a word, so I send that out to them. They're gonna charge me. So I it's a vendor and have to pay the freelancers, and then I mark it up for the MLB, that multi language, multi language vendor. And so it keeps getting marked up and marked up to reflect project management. And so, by the end of the top of this visually see, suddenly it's 30 cents per over. There are a huge number of variables involved. Obviously, the language itself is core to this. If it is Spanish, which is a very commonly translated of language with A with a very large basic vendors, the cost forward can be quite low. Arabic for could be quite expensive. The different languages very intensive costs based on the number of vendors available to support that language. But there are other variables to the quantity of work. If you're going to send a job of 100,000 words to a vendor, they're gonna be very excited to quote that, because it's a big job and they're going to give you a lower cost per word versus if you send them 100 word document because they have overhead. Just getting started, getting on boarding that that job there's a lot of over the predictability of delivering projects is important if you know you're gonna have a few 1000 words a week of new content into six languages. Vendors gonna be very excited about that because that allows them to budget in freelancers and have them on standby every week. And and so they predictability allows him to to give you a discount. Big guys, their their management costs go down. The complexity of the job is a huge variable. If it's software localization and the software is a mess and the text that they have to pull out of the software applications, it is difficult to extract. Or there's not a lot of commenting on it. So the vendors don't really know how to translate text strength. That's very complicated stuff, so it depends on the nature of the job. The complexity also tournament the complexity of the terminology. If it's say, transition for a very, very specialized airline component that Boeing is created and you need a translator who is an engineer for has an engineering background, your costs are gonna go up because suddenly you you need a very specialized translator, very specialized editor. So keep that in in med A. In the medical fields, many of the translators have medical training and so they're gonna that their costs are going to reflect that the tools and platform platform being meeting If you are working off of a, uh, smart cat, for example, that that could could benefit you to a large degree because you're gonna perhaps have translation memories. Two to upload and glossary and so forth. So the tools you used Teoh there that your vendor supports. And if they're commonly used tools and everyone shares and understands that will make things easier for everyone and of course, make your costs, we're manageable. And, of course, I mentioned translation memories recycling. If you can recycle, you're gonna save my And the time to think about translation memories is now in those translation memories. You own them, okay. And that should be important to be something that's very clear with your vendors. It's generally accepted across the industry that the client owns. Translation memories didn't used to be that way. It is now, but that is a valuable asset that you are now going to be developing and building. And it's important that you prioritise that going forward in the finally turnaround if you send a vendor. Ah, job and, uh, a few 1000 words and you want it tomorrow morning. That's a rush job. If you want it in two weeks, it's not. And so though those factors, the turnaround is really critical to costs as well. If you if you have a nice lead time on a project that's good as well for very large job, sometimes the lead times six months, they will ah, company will will have a new, uh, new automobile, uh, manual, which is quite large. Is anyone has seen an automobile manual there. 16 80,000 words there that that can take six stay months to develop. And in that time, the vendor is secured and they have time to prepare for the translation of that of that sample prices. I mentioned that Arabic comes in at the top tier. You can. This is just also very dated and and not something to get locked in on. But just to show you the variance in prices based on language, pairs, you know, say French to her back, and so far it varies a lot and also varies whether you're working with the an MLB or with freelancers, um, important to note, a translator can handle 2500 words on average a day, 10 pages. So if you've got a huge volume of work, what's gonna happen then and a tight turn out the vendor, you're gonna need multiple translators. The vendor is gonna have to find multiple freelancers, and it could get a little rescue because the more translators you have, the more variable the quality in bay, the greater room for error and that once again, this is where translation, memory and glossaries comes in really handy, because it it's pushed out to all the vendors and keeps him on the same page since May. But just just know that that that there are limits to what a human being can handle. And, uh, and that should give you an idea as you're starting to budget and think about the volume of work and how many freelancers you might need. Here's Ah, sample quote. It's an old quote that I use in. The book was provided by Ericsson translations on. Then I'll mention my book in a minute, but I just wanted to include this just to give you a feel. This isn't old. Just a one page. Very simple. It's there's no actual dollar science put in, but to give you an understanding of how it's broken down and I zoomed in here, but you can see there's a file preparation quote, translation, validation and client review validation so you can see that it's broken out so that the word count the raper word. And this is one line for each language pair. So these are the stages of the job. And as we move down from validation, we get into if there's if there's localization visuals, it's an hourly charge because often with visuals, it's really not about text. It's about you giving them an illustrator file or in design file, and then they have to open those up and then work within those files. It's really not a about a lot of tax. It's more about the time spent adapting those visuals. Ah, and then, if you have a website post localization testing, bug fixing, its that are also an hourly rate. There's project management, which is added on and turn around and so forth. So it this gives you just up another view of what a sample proposal might look like. And as you go forth and look for vendors on, there's some questions to keep in mind first, what is your industry specialty? I highly recommend, particularly if you're a smaller company looking. You talk if you can talk to your competitors and find out what vendors they use within your industry that that might short cut you quite a saving a lot of time because there are vendors who who really specialize within certain industry verticals. And there's value in that because they know the terminology already. They know the if it's regulatory issues area, know what those are so that there's value to that. And then, of course, what's your project? Specialty? Some vendors are stronger with software websites, or some might be stronger with product manuals. You know, vendors. We're gonna tell you they can do everything into any language. They almost always do say that. But if you dig a little, you're gonna find out where they're stronger and the weaker. You do want to speak to whoever is gonna be your potential project manager. I think that's really, really important. You're also gonna want to speak with at least one, probably a several of the clients and this is this is a great opportunity to talk to, perhaps a competitive er ah, project someone. Ah, a competitive company. And hopefully they'll be candid with you about the vendor. And it's just great research. And I really recommend doing a lot of research. Your vendor, When you select a vendor, you're it is a relationship, and it is hopefully a long term positive relationship. And like any relationship, the more time you put in on the front end. In terms of due diligence, the better the odds that it's gonna be a positive relationship down the road. Uh, it's also useful to ask your client to your vendor. I'm sorry. Uh, how can I save money? Your vendors gonna look at your job that you have in mind, and they're gonna be able to look immediately. If they're good, they're gonna immediately see areas that are that could be problematic during the during the job areas. It might be really expensive that that you could avoid if you re thought some of the way you created a product or a website or or what? Not if they can provide that, uh, input to you earlier than later. You're going to save money, you're gonna have a better appreciation for their services. Eso asked those questions Sample translations. This is common. They expect to be asked to provide sample translations. I don't think there at the end all because they don't necessarily, um, tell you exactly what you need to know, because when vendors do sample translations, they put a little extra work into those. Whereas when we get into the action project, they may not put that same degree of effort into it. But it's still, I think the real value of sample translations is just getting a feel for the process of working with your PM and just getting a feel doesn't feel right. Does this person communicate? Well, uh, and and that's really I think, the goal with with sample translation and finally years ago, have publishes book. It's on this a second or third, I think addition. Now the savvy clients going to translation agencies, you can you can find more information. I'm sorry of it. Um, back here, you can find out more information here by local books. It is dated to some degree, but if you're new to translation, it's a great resource and, as always, contact me because you are most likely going through the stages of budgeting your your job and talking to vendors doing research. So if you have questions stand touch. Okay. Thank you.