Cost Saving Tips on Translation Costs

Think outsourcing your e-commerce website’s translation and localization project is too cost prohibitive? Think again. Here are some scenarios in which a translation and localization partner can actually present opportunities for cost savings.

How to save $100 on language-related spending

For the company that wants to offer a few English-language documents in, for example, Spanish, it can be tempting to turn to a bilingual employee for help. However, relying on your Spanish-speaking accountant to translate your content has hidden costs. While a professional translator might charge $200 and finish the project in 30 minutes, an inexperienced individual might need three hours to do the same amount of work, creating a lost productivity cost.


How to save $1,000 on language-related spending

Outsource your multilingual typesetting services rather than leaning on your internal designers. Asian and other character languages can be difficult to work with, but it’s just as important to employ professional typesetting services for French, German, Spanish, and other languages, which carry their own challenges, including font considerations, line and word breaks, text expansion, accent marks and umlauts, and dropped text. A typesetting project that costs $800 to outsource would likely require five to 10 hours of internal typesetter time, including the requirement to purchase the necessary fonts.


How to save $10,000 on language-related spending

If you’re spending $100k or more annually on translation, find one or two providers that can handle all your projects, and then leverage vendor loyalty to get a better price. Even if you only have a couple of big translation jobs per year, a volume-negotiated savings of 1 cent per word adds up fast.


How to save $100,000 on language-related spending

If your multinational business is spending up to $500,000 on translation, cut costs with translation management technologies such as project and workflow management platforms, translation memory (TM) tools, terminology management glossaries, file exchange portals, and collaborative solutions for reviews and approvals.
While TM tools alone have the potential to save your organization nearly $100,000 in hard costs alone, workflow management systems for project submission, pre-flighting, tracking, review, and delivery drive soft-cost savings by reducing internal project management burdens.


How to save $1 million on language-related spending

If your company has a multi-million-dollar annual translation budget, maximize savings by identifying and centralizing translation services to a single or small group of reliable providers. Once you consolidate, negotiate for better per-word costs, turnaround times and rush premiums. Finally, innovate with server-based translation memory and workflow improvements. A company with a $5 million translation budget can likely cut:

• $80,000 by consolidating vendors
• $175,000 by negotiating better per-word rates
• $765,000 by innovating with translation technology

While every translation and localization budget differs, almost any internationally focused business can reduce its translation costs, improve efficiency and consistency in the short term, and maximize translation spending in the long term by working with a language translation service provider. With consolidation, negotiation, and innovation, businesses can capture significant savings.

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Source: Business2community
Author: Liz Elting