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When I started my first job in the translation industry as a project manager more than 15 years ago, one of the biggest surprises for me was the number of translation requests we received for French. After all, weren’t Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic the most “important” languages for translation now?
Your marketing team has been working tirelessly on developing catchy and alluring content over the last several months for your imminent global marketing plan. Now, one of the final steps is translating all of that content, perhaps into Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, or even Swahili.
Translation, interpretation, and localization services have become one of the most important industries in the global marketplace. What was once considered to be a small, niche industry is now valued at close to $50 billion worldwide and serves as one of the key driving forces of global economic integration. However, despite the industry’s importance, it may come as a surprise that there are still many misconceptions when it comes to foreign language translation. Therefore, this week’s blog is devoted to debunking the most common translation myths.
When you’ve finally found the perfect language service provider (LSP) to work with you on your organization’s foreign language translation needs, the next step is how to go about setting your translation partner up for success. If you take the time to develop a plan and institute some fundamental processes, you will be well on your way to establishing a successful and long-term relationship.
A frequent point of confusion for many translation clients relates to “certified” translations. In the translation industry, the word “certified” can refer to different things. For example, a “certification” can be a document attached to a translation for use in a legal proceeding, or a translator or interpreter themselves possessing some form of “certification” that validates their competency. Since this has confused many clients, we’re going to explain what is a “certified” translation.
If you’re an old hand when it comes to working with translation services providers, you have almost certainly worked with a translation project manager. For most clients, the interaction is relatively superficial, and the project manager (PM) is simply the person to whom you send your translation project and then sends back your completed translations.
When it comes to purchasing translation services, one of the first questions a prospective client asks is how much is the translation going to cost. What is important to understand for clients, however, is that unlike typical commodities and services, the cost for a translation is highly variable.
One of the more difficult pills for customers and prospective customers to swallow when it comes to procuring translation services is the cost. While translation costs have come down in recent years due in part to an increase in competition in the industry as well as the implementation of new technology solutions such as computer-assisted translation (CAT) and machine translation (MT), many clients still experience “sticker shock” when they start receiving quotes for their translation or localization project.
Chinese has undoubtedly become one of the most popular languages for translation and localization over the past two decades owing to the dramatic growth of the Chinese economy, including the now more than 800 million Internet users in China with more disposable income to spend, and an e-commerce market expected to grow to $1.8 trillion by 2022. Not to mention, with the more than 2.8 million Chinese speakers in the United States – which represents the third most spoken language in the country (after English and Spanish) – Chinese translation, interpretation, and localization services have become even more vital.
There is no doubt that tech firms have made great strides in automated language 
translation in the last decade. Advances in processing power, algorithms, and voice recognition are now providing almost seamless communication between humans and machine, yet human-to-human communication using a machine interface is still fraught with difficulties and dangers.