Wednesday 27 November 2013

The Cost and Pricing Factor in Translation Services



If you are in the translation services business or are seeking such services for education, training or media work, then both cost and pricing are important. One of the most persistent issues for your business could well be the cost factor. You receive orders from clients for translation work as they are looking for cheaper, faster, and quality work. To fulfill such business expectations, you make plans and execute them in the best way possible. You may still find controlling costs a little difficult despite using new techniques and tools for improving efficiency. If you hire translation services for your business, better pricing with high quality will help you save on operating expenses.


As a service provider what can you do to manage costs more efficiently so that you can keep competitive pricing, provide quality yet fast delivery time, and create a significant profit margin? Organizations with global vision find it a challenge to keep operating costs under control as they need to invest significantly in order to have a competitive edge in the global economy. For creating a niche in such a domain, you need to provide acceptable pricing and service quality as per the international standard. In that endeavor, you can implement the following action plan for effective cost management:

  • Some translation service providers offer multilingual A/V audio-visual recording as well as subtitling along with high quality (ISO 9001 certified) translation work by the experts. Also, with proper software localization, all the components can be quantified in terms of words to translate, to review, and to leverage from previous translations, page layout, compilation of topics and of course Quality Assurance (QA) work. 
  • Service providers with a translation website and an automated system can significantly reduce service costs by eliminating non-value added tasks and the third parties involved in the process. In this way you will be able to provide high quality translation services instead of wasting too much time for exchanging files, resource management or accounting. The reduced cost will enable you to offer more competitive pricing to your clients.
  • If you have a translation website, it will allow clients to request free quotes to get pricing in advance. Also, through the website you can simplify the communication process with the clients.
  • Try to optimize different components that include localization costs. The optimization process is quite important as it will lead to significant reduction of translation and localization project costs.

By saving long term localization costs, service providers can invest that amount in hiring professional translators and make the quality assurance (QA) system efficient and robust. This will provide benefits to both service providers and clients and create a win-win situation.