How Do You Know You’re Getting an Accurate Translation?

Practical tips to ensure you get the quality translation you need.

Imagine it’s a Tuesday. Your company receives an important document in a foreign language that no one on your team speaks. You spring into action and contact a translator or translation company you’ve used before in order to commission a translation. Great work! But…

How do you know you’ll receive an accurate translation back? The short answer (and the most frustrating, we know) is: you don’t. Not even asking your translator or translation company to issue you a certificate of translation accuracy solves this problem. What you’ll need is some good old-fashioned due diligence.

Vetting (before translation) and checking (after translation) are the only ways you’ll know that you’re getting both what you need and what you’re paying for. This includes ensuring the resources and translation process used for your translation, quality control procedures too, will meet or exceed certain standards, and to have the translation reviewed for accuracy once it has been completed. Consider the following for best results:

Minimum Standards for Accurate Translation

Translator qualifications: Who will translate? Are they a native speaker of the target language? Do they have a degree in translation studies? Do they have at least five years of professional translation experience? Do they have specialist or subject matter experience in the topic of the document to translate?

Translation process and quality control: Will the process include translation, as well as editing and proofreading? In addition, will there be a series of manual and automated checks for quality performed?

Independent Review to Ensure Accurate Translation

Trust, but verify, as they say. Engaging an independent review of a completed translation will help you to uncover any quality issues before they have time to do damage to your company’s reputation or worse.
Please consult our Translation Checkers’ Kit for an in-depth look at who should perform this type of review and how it should be done. The kit includes an Error Log template that any reviewer or checker is free to use.

Get Accurate Translation Every Day

Quality is the reason Responsive Translation is often called in to put out the fires left burning by other language service providers. We won’t begin a project until we’re sure we know what you want and that we can do it well. From translation to editing to quality assurance, we make sure the right person with the right expertise and experience is entrusted with the task. And then we constantly check, check, check for quality and banish errors so that you will receive nothing but the best foreign-language services possible.

To learn more, please get in touch at 646-847-3309 or [email protected].