How can you optimise budgets for professional translations?

• Choice of languages: before deciding which languages to translate your content into, you should determine where your current website’s traffic originates from and which markets have the highest conversion rates. Thus armed with data, you can decide which languages are most essential for your business and translate only a portion of the content for markets that are less attractive. Bear in mind, nevertheless, that in some countries the translation of certain documents is required by law. An example is Korea, where it is obligatory to provide documentation (manuals and essential website sections) in the local language. For prospective markets, however, you could use SEO techniques, such as keyword research and keyword gap analysis, to understand the position of potential local competitors or to identify countries with high demand and low competition.
• Rely on an LSP – Language Service Provider – to work with Translation Memories. The translation memory (TM) is a real language database in which texts in the originating language (source) and their translation into the destination language (target) are stored. Translation memories will help you attain terminological and stylistic consistency across all business documents and will enable the Language Service Provider (LSP) to identify repetitions, i.e. words or text segments that have previously been translated and revised. This will reduce your translation costs because you will never have to pay twice for the same content, as well as the time required for translation.
• Reuse past content by updating it to current needs: evergreen content is content that retains its value and relevance over time without becoming obsolete. Unlike event-specific content, evergreen content is always relevant and can be useful and engaging for the audience over time. If you have such content, you can publish it on your blog in the form of posts, newsletters and articles several times per year, taking care to revise any references to time. For these articles, where the proportion of new text is negligible, professional translations will be less expensive, but you will always provide your audience with fresh content.
• Organise your work to avoid last-minute requests: planning enables you to designate the entire project to a single native speaker, resulting in a final cost savings and a higher level of style consistency.
• Assign the translation work to an LSP capable of processing multiple formats and delivering source files with the translation already inserted. This way, you won’t need to entrust a graphic designer with the copy-and-paste work, and you can rest assured that it will be completed professionally, on time and in full compliance with the most complex formatting requirements for languages such as Arabic, Chinese and Japanese.
• Choose a language partner with the right credentials. A company with the quality certifications UNI EN ISO 9001:2015 – UNI EN ISO 17100:2017 and UNI 10574:2007 guarantees a professional product that does not require additional revisions.

If your budget for professional translations is small relative to the quantity of content to be translated, follow these six tips and select a partner who can optimise your budget without sacrificing the quality of your content!