Cost of Translation: Balancing Time and Quality

17. Mai 2023y

Evaluating translation quality is an essential part of your translation workflow if you want to effectively balance the time and cost needed for any translation project. For example, companies that operate in technology or fintech verticals often have large amounts of content that needs to be translated quickly at a reasonable rate — without sacrificing quality.

Whether you’re looking at a translation project to produce material in target languages like English, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, or any of the other 130 world languages, you want to make sure that you’re getting the most bang for your buck without losing quality.

So, what are the factors that affect translation costs and quality? Let’s look at ways that the technology and fintech sectors use translation services, plus how they balance translation quality with cost. After that, we’ll explore how Unbabel’s artificial intelligence methodology lands in the sweet spot of optimizing for speed and cost while still producing high-quality translations.

How is translation used in the technology sector?

Translation plays a crucial role in the technology sector, where software, websites, and digital content need to be translated into multiple languages to reach a global audience and scale to new markets. Translation can also be used to facilitate communication between different teams and stakeholders in a globalized business environment, enabling companies to collaborate and exchange ideas with people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Additionally, translation is essential for customer support and user experience, as it helps companies to provide multilingual technical support, product documentation, and user interfaces that cater to the needs of diverse customers around the globe.

Machine translation, natural language processing, and other AI-based technologies have made it easier to translate content quickly and accurately — something that more and more technology companies are relying on for their translation needs.

How is translation used in the fintech sector?

Translation is also an essential tool in the fintech sector to translate financial documents, software applications, and websites into multiple languages to improve global outreach and attract more customers.

Because fintech services like online payments, digital banking, and investment management often occur across borders, companies in the fintech sector require their services and products to be accessible to customers in different languages.

Customer service is also a significant reason that fintech companies need translation services. By offering support services like chat, email, and FAQs in a variety of languages, companies are better able to engage with their customers.

What is translation quality, and how do you evaluate it?

With the widespread need for translation services in the technology and fintech verticals, how can companies ensure that the materials being translated are up to snuff? It all comes down to translation quality.

Translation quality is a measure of how accurately and reliably content has been translated from the source language to the target language (or across multiple languages). In order to evaluate translation quality, those in the translation industry assess various aspects of a translated text, including accuracy, fluency, adequacy, and other qualitative aspects of a translated piece of text. Additionally, evaluating translation rates for cost-effectiveness can help businesses reduce translation time/cost while maintaining high customer satisfaction scores.

The importance of measuring the quality of the translation process should not be underestimated as it has a direct impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty — something no company can afford to risk losing.

How to balance translation costs, time, and quality

Although translation is crucial for many global businesses to effectively reach customers and partners around the world, the cost of translation services can be both significant and hard to predict. Translation rates vary based on a large number of factors, including word count, turnaround time, and the language pairs that you need to translate. In addition, if you’re using human translation, that professional translator’s skill and experience will also affect the cost.

One of the most important factors when balancing translation costs, time, and quality is the selection of the right translation partner. Professional and experienced translation agencies can help you to optimize the balance between cost, time, and quality by providing a tailored solution that meets your specific needs. They can guide you through the translation process, provide feedback on the scope and complexity of your project, and offer various translation options, such as machine translation, post-editing, or human translation, based on your budget and time constraints. By choosing the right translation partner, you can streamline the translation process and achieve the best possible results for your business.

Unbabel’s machine translation and quality estimation solution provides a cost-effective choice for brands that want to achieve their translation goals at scale. By using advanced translation tools and quality estimation capabilities, Unbabel can help businesses reduce translation time/cost while ensuring accuracy across all languages.

How Unbabel helps: Machine translation and quality estimation

With Unbabel’s machine translation and quality estimation solution, customers are able to quickly translate large amounts of content with accuracy and efficiency. Unbabel uses AI-driven machine translation technology to create translations of your materials and then provides a quality estimation score. This score is a reflection of how accurate the AI model thinks that the translation is.

This quality estimation score allows for a second step: Professional linguists who provide quality control. Using our quality estimation scores, these subject matter experts are able to focus their time on proofreading the sections where the model believes errors to be more likely. This combination of machine-learning models and skilled humans reduces translation time and cost while still ensuring that the translations provided are of the highest quality.

High-speed, cost-effective translation at scale

Unbabel’s machine translation and quality estimation solution is a great way for companies operating in the tech or fintech verticals to cost-effectively meet their translation needs. By using this AI-driven machine translation technology alongside professional linguists, companies can reduce translation time and cost while still creating effective, high-quality translations of key material for their localization projects.

Contact us today to discuss how our services can help you improve the speed of your translation needs while maintaining high quality.

About the Author

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Content Team

Unbabel’s Content Team is responsible for showcasing Unbabel’s continuous growth and incredible pool of in-house experts. It delivers Unbabel’s unique brand across channels and produces accessible, compelling content on translation, localization, language, tech, CS, marketing, and more.

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