Here at ICS-translate we believe translation is worth every penny. The online presence of a business is more important than ever before, providing the opportunity to reach clients in all corners of the globe. An almost infinite number of customers sounds like a dream, right? However, with an international audience you must also navigate hundreds of different languages. Don’t be afraid! With a professional and trusted translation agency like ICS-translate you can easily unlock your business’ global potential.
What about the cost? Well, translation has come a long way since the days of writing out every text by hand and technology is now at the forefront of the translation revolution. One of the biggest advantages of this technology is that it reduces costs, making translation services even better value for money!
Some translation agencies, ICS-translate included, use something called a CAT tool to aid their translation. CAT stands for Computer Assisted Translation and saves money in these three ways:
In some files certain chunks of text will be repeated multiple times. For a simple example, in a bread recipe, the instruction “Knead the dough.” may be repeated several times. When there are these repetitions in the source the translations are likely to also be identical repetitions too. Therefore, companies can offer discounts for repeated text. When a CAT tool processes a file for translation it splits the text up into segments and can quickly calculate how many are repeated throughout the text, making the discount process quick and easy!
It is still important that the translators check over any repeated segments as the context of the repeated line may not be the exact same, requiring a different translation due to the grammatical rules in a language i.e. different gender, nouns vs verbs or statements vs questions which all change in many languages.
One of the amazing things about CAT tools is the potential to use Translation Memory. Put simply, a translation memory is a database created by a CAT tool of every translation ever done in a certain language for a certain client. This means that the CAT tool doesn’t just simply recognise any repetitions in the translation file itself but can compare the text to any work done for the client in the past to see if any text has been translated before.
These are called TM matches. This infinite memory helps our human translators immensely. If any text has been exactly or partly translated before, the CAT tool will automatically suggest a translation. These suggestions and pre-translations mean a translator doesn’t always have to create everything from scratch, saving them a lot of time and effort. Have you guessed what’s coming next? This means discounts for any matches a text may have with previous translation memory! The longer a client works with a translation agency like ICS-translate, the more their translation memory database will grow, meaning more discounts can be offered.
Not only do CAT tools save you money through discounts, but they also improve the overall quality. Consistency is one of the keys to a great quality translation and thanks to the TM’s suggestions when translating a new text, a translator can easily keep consistent in style and terminology with past translations. A CAT tool also improves quality by facilitating easy and efficient term bases and by running an automatic Quality Assurance check in order to spot errors. The best quality means the best value for money!
Hopefully hearing these amazing money saving techniques will help you to understand how simple and cost effective it can be to take your business to the global level through a great translation agency like ICS-translate.
