Translation Value

Outsourcing is a fantastic invention. For a service fee I can get access to expertise, equipment and localities that would be totally out of reach for my company to build in-house.

I am working on a book related to how many of Enspyre’s customers are coping with not having an office. The next step of this book project is to find a good translator or translation company that can do a good job translating my book from English to Chinese.

As always when one deals with a new service category there are a lot of things one have to learn in order to evaluate who is the best service provider.

I was under the impression that translators worked with whatever software that the customers files was in. For example, I am writing my book in Word so I assumed I would send that file to someone who would open it in Word and then write the Chinese either in the same document or in a new Word document which is opened at the same time.

Well, what I found was that many freelancers still do it that way but the larger more professional companies has gone away from this way to work. I’ll give you an example. One of the world’s largest translation companies is STAR AG based out of Switzerland. They have an office right here in Taipei and 44 other offices spread out over the world.

They have developed a so called Computer Aided Translation software called TRANSIT which helps them increase their efficiency.

Transit can open just about any kind of file which is really helpful but the real kicker is that it splits the content and the design. This means that if a word was red and bold in the original it will also be red and bold in the new language. This saves money on design.

Transit will also make sure that the translator doesn’t have to translate anything more than once. Whenever they get a new case from someone they load Transit with not only the current project but also any other project they have ever done for that customer. The software then searches through all the previous projects to see if there is anything already translated that can be applicable to the new file. Exact matches are automatically applied by the software and non-exact matches appear as suggestions for the translator.

All this of course means that the translator is much more efficient. He or she can spend time making the perfect translation rather than doing the stuff that a computer can do so much faster.

I see this as a company that has figured out how to add value. Too many service companies are just collections of freelancers with the company adding little but the space for them to work out of. STAR seems to have figured out how they will provide superior value and quality to their customers.

So I am shopping for a service but get myself some business lessons. That’s a good bargain!

If you need any translations I suggestion you check out:

STAR Taiwan
www.star-taiwan.com
+886-2-2708-9080