Working with a translator - Esta Translation

How to work with a translator

Do you know the process translators follow to get your content out there? Whether you use a large translation agency that offers many languages or choose a freelance translator, working with a translation partner will bring your company language knowledge, expertise and ideas to excel in a foreign market. Remember – professional translators are native speakers of your future audience’s language – always translating from your language to their mother tongue.

To guarantee a high-quality translation, every project goes through three stages: translation, editing and proofreading. But before that, these are the simple steps I follow for every translation enquiry:

Working with your translator partner: what to expect

Get in touch – normally by email with some details of the translation work required.
Scoping meeting – in-person or via conference call to confirm the project details and estimated delivery time.
Quote – based on the improvements or translation needs of your website content, blog articles, etc, discussed at the scoping meeting.
Agreement – accepting the quote and rates with contracts sent and signed.
Translation – the project is in progress and regular updates are sent.
Editing and proofreading – making sure the translation is high quality.
Delivery – sending over the finished translations.
Changes – making any minor adjustments, if required.

Factors that I always consider when quoting a translation job:

How complex is the subject: If your content is technical and specialised, I will need time to research the topic and create glossaries. These will affect the price, and a flat fee for research will be added.

The types of content: Marketing, advertising content, and SEO translation are charged per hour. Think how long it took your marketing team to decide on and create your content. Ask yourself how long it takes to write your content until you are happy with it then don’t forget to ask your SEO expert how long they took to conduct a keyword analysis. As an SEO translator, I go through a similar process. I am not just writing words and converting them into another language, I am a thinker, highly trained in more than one language, a researcher, and a creator who know the cultural aspects of the languages that I work with.

The quality: I offer high-quality professional translation, which includes editing and proofreading, the latter is charged per hour. Request now a quote for a high-quality professional translation. Don’t rely on cheap quotes where the editing or proofreading are not included. If you want your content to be ready for publication, always ensure that the documents have gone through a quality control stage. In the end, this is what businesses ask content creators to do, right? To proofread before hitting the send/ publish the item.

The language combination: Some language combination affects the price and the complexity of the translation, therefore you will find that when requesting quotes for the most common European language combinations i.e: English into Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese their price tend to be lower than if you are requesting quotes for combinations from and into Chinese, Japanese or Arabic, for example. I only translate from English to Spanish and Catalan to Spanish so, my prices are more competitive.

The type of translation: general translation, SEO translation, specialised translation? General translation covers business documents such as guides, E-books, presentations, communications, information leaflets, and brochures. SEO translations involve optimising content to be ranked by search engines and be searchable by your audience. Specialised translation is when the content is highly technical in a particular field. These include legal texts, medical texts, engineering, travel and tourism, etc.
Read more about SEO translation service here

Person takes notes before working with a translator

What to ask to your translator before buying translation services

If you are worried about how complex the translation process is and what you should do before working with a translator, these are the 5 most frequent questions that businesses ask all the time:

How are translation services normally priced?

For general translation, the charge is per word, and for specialist services, specialist translation, SEO translation, proofreading, and keyword research, per hour.

How can I check the copy is translated properly?

I work with native Spanish highly qualified translators and proofreaders who live in Spain and the UK, so your copy is double-checked by me and by another professional who has direct contact with their mother tongue daily. This is to ensure that your translations sound natural, are localised to your market, and capture the reader’s attention. I like to have my work checked with a pair of fresh eyes, especially if your content is going to be published globally and your customers are going to read it. Think about your reputation and don’t rely on someone you know who happens to know Spanish and lived in Spain for a year and thinks can translate and edit professionally. As a business and employer, you require a native person with excellent English to write the content for your website, so the same applies to your translations. Always seek translators that will translate into their native language. It is worth the investment.

I have a lot of content to translate, can I get a discount?

At our first meeting, we will discuss your needs and the amount of content you would like to translate. I will then issue the best quote which will reflect the amount of work to undertake and estimate of hours. Free advice is given during the meeting and a small translation sample (between 100-150 words) will be given at a reduced price for you to check the translation quality.

Do I need to send you a brief of what I would like to achieve with the translation?

Yes. Other translators I collaborate with are knowledgeable about the tourism and hospitality industry, gastronomy, and business in general, so you must provide us your brief with a summary of the target audience want to reach, a glossary of terms and keywords you would like us to use, the tone and style. If you don’t have the latter ones, we can conduct keyword research for your company at an extra charge.

Our website is machine-translated, can you post-edit it?

We know how machine translation has evolved and in some contexts is delivering a fair quality translation. However, machine translation copy or AI content is not recommended if your content wants to resonate with your audience and you are selling your product or services online. Remember that marketing and copywriting copy is written to reach readers’ emotions. Therefore, if the purpose of your piece of text is not selling and it is just for internal use and information only, I can price your content for revision and editing, this is to make it sound natural and idiomatic. However, if your copy has the purpose of selling we have the skills to use SEO practises and localisation effectively across the text.

working with a translator with a smart phone and a cup of coffee

Want to know more about working with a translator?

Book an appointment with me now