Outsourcing Translation to an LSP

Many companies face the internal decision of either outsourcing their translation needs or keeping them in-house. Over the past decade there has been a trend for companies to outsource as much translation work as possible, and for good reason. 

When keeping translations internal, companies face the choice of either staffing an entire translation department dedicated to translating various company documents or utilizing current staff such as sales or marketing reps to translate content. 

1. If you decide to create an entire department for translation, you must first have significant enough translation demand to justify hiring and paying salaries for dedicated translators. As with any company you can expect increases and decreases in the demand for translation over a given year. This can result in significant downtime for translators with nothing to do, or slow down production when everyone is waiting on the translation department to work on their content. 

2.If you decide to utilize current staff to translate content as it comes up, then you likely don’t have as high a demand for translations. This, however, means that you must take time from your employee’s standard day-to-day functions in order to allot time for translation. Additionally, in these situations we tend to see that employers assume that being bilingual automatically qualifies an employee to translate content, when in fact this is not true at all. Translators undergo years of training and practice to become proficient at the art and skill of converting content from one language to another.  Utilizing untrained staff for translation work can result in embarrassing errors, or mistranslations that can cost a company dearly.

Outsourcing translation work ultimately eliminates all these dilemmas. By working closely with an LSP, companies have access to a larger network of resources, lowered costs, quicker turnarounds, and greater flexibility. LSPs have the resources to build glossaries, store translation memories, access to content specialists, and stay up to date on industry standards and certifications.