Buying
How to Buy Quality Translations
Choosing a Translator or a Translation Company
A simple commercial letter can be translated by most translators, but who are you going to entrust with your Technical Manuals, your Contracts, your Advertising Brochures, and your Catalogs? After all the care, time and quality that you put into producing those documents, it makes sense to choose very good translation professionals to translate them into other languages. Your company’s image in other countries is totally dependent on the quality and accuracy of the documentation that your clients can read there. You should not cut corners, or you image will suffer severely.
Of course there are big names in the field of Translation Companies. Some companies are large and well known, but do you want to pay their top prices? In fact they have few translators (or none) in their offices, and sub-contract most of their jobs to smaller and more specialized companies like ours, or to individual freelancers.
The other peril is giving the translation to a friend of James, the accountant, who speaks great French because he studied sales for one year in Paris… Or to his cousin in Marseilles (who happens to be an unemployed car salesman…). Please use your common sense and give your translation jobs only to qualified professional translators, and if you cannot check their qualifications and proficiency, choose a good Translation Company that will take that responsibility off your shoulders. The savings from cutting corners will probably come back to haunt you a few months later… In fact would you select a surgeon, a sales professional, an accountant on price alone? Or on the recommendation of your next door neighbor?
The Perils of Inexperience
It takes skilled professionals to understand the nuanced requirements of translated content. Rely on CYBERTEC, a specialized translation company that ensures you work with qualified professionals, saving you from the risks associated with inexperienced translators.
Price versus Quality
A high quality professional job cannot be “cheap”, but if you compare the cost of a good translation to the other costs of producing your good products and/or services, you will realize that the translation costs represent only a small percentage of the whole cost. It is not worth trying to extract a savings from your translation costs if the quality may be compromised.Saving a few dollars here can kill a large sale or devastate an entire export drive.
Portuguese & Specialties:
Industrial, Medical, Biotech., Chem., etc.
Because Portugal is a small country (less than 10 million people) it is extremely difficult to find translators (in country and emigrants) who are specialized professionals in most fields. The main reason is that the few that have the language capability are overloaded with work in their existing technical jobs and quite well paid, and will not bother to do translations at the rates usually paid in the market for translations. Cybertec USA has solved this problem in two different ways: We have engineers and other professionals in house and as freelancers, for several technical specialties and quite a few other subjects.
For other subjects and specialties, we rely on very experienced translators and editors who are given access to consultants in those fields that they do not master completely. We have been working with most of these people for many years and they have gained our trust.
And for more “exotic” languages, that we don’t usually handle, we cooperate with other specialized Translation Companies to use their resources, and we can manage those jobs for our clients certainly much better than our clients, who are not in the translation industry, could do themselves directly. Basically, we offer our clients quality, reliability and peace of mind, at a fair price.
The medical and biotech fields have been growing and for several decades. We have been doing E>Pt translations helped by one of the top Portuguese surgeons, a few doctors in Lisbon, a Portuguese Oncology Institute researcher (for biotech) and professors of the Lisbon Universities. This solution may not be perfect, but has worked surprisingly well and at a manageable cost. In a recent year, we completed several biotech jobs for 4 different clients. The same type of solution was used for aeronautical regulations (255,000 words), and for air base regulations (500,000 words) a few years ago.
Biotech and Medical Fields
There has been continuous growth in the medical and biotech sectors, and we boast over 35 years of experience in delivering English-to-Portuguese translations in these fields. Our esteemed collaborators include one of the top Portuguese surgeons, several Lisbon-based doctors, a researcher from the Portuguese Oncology Institute (specifically for biotech), and professors from Lisbon universities.
While this arrangement might not be flawless, it has proven to be remarkably effective and cost-efficient. In a recent year, we successfully executed four biotech projects for two distinct clients, with word counts of 108,000, 94,000, 57,000, and 12,000 in English.
We adopted a similar methodology for aeronautical regulations, which involved 255,000 words, and air base regulations, encompassing a massive 500,000 words just a few years prior.
Choose CYBERTEC, and rest assured that you get quality, reliability, and peace of mind at a fair price. If you have questions about our translation services, please get in touch with us today. Let’s connect our worlds through words.