There are a couple of things that influence the quality of a translation you’re buying:

• Is the translator familiar with your text? TM-Town may be helping you to discover this.
• Is the source text OK? In a previous life I was responsible for buying millions of words per month, translations from English to Spanish & French. The English was written by Asian writers. Their English, just like mine, was OK for only 90%. That 10% of source-trouble triggered 50% of our quality issues in the translation. We created a very good QC system, so what we delivered to our customer was high quality, despite the quality of the source text. This is great but not unique: when I read my texts translated in French by a professional translator, I’m always impressed by how a good translator adds value to my writings.
• Is the translator careful and accurate? There’s only one way to find out: organize human quality control. QA tools may help you in the process of setting up QC, but they won’t be able to tell you how good a translator is. At best they can tell you if there are issues with a translation but even when they alert you, just know a lot of the alerts are wrong and a lot of real problems are not found by those tools. Only human translators can tell you how good or how bad a translation is. All QA tools that I know fail to detect machine translation, and that is of course the last thing you want to buy! If you are happy with machine translation, just use Google Translate or Bing Translator, but don’t expect your reader to understand every sentence and don’t expect every sentence to make sense.
• Is the translator willing to WORK on your translation?

Guess what: in order for a translator to WORK carefully on your translation, (s)he needs TIME. Terminology, Translation Memories and even Machine Translation may help, but in the end if (s)he does not spend enough TIME on your job, your investment may go down the drain.

The good news

TIME is something you can buy. You can’t buy the translator’s love, but you can buy her/his time. Just don’t pay her/him peanuts for the job.

There are several ways to pay your translator correctly:

• Pay per hour: Ask for a quote but let the translator decide how to build the quote. Don’t force him/her to do a word count and count fuzzy matches… In case you wonder: the translator probably will do a word count, he will analyze the job carefully, but (s)he will also look at the complexity of the source text, the relationship between the images and the text, the internal repetitions (forcing him/her to make sure the translation is consistent), the terminology he does (not) know… There is much more to consider than just the word count. Only a production time estimate is a correct and safe way to make a quote. When her/his estimate is correct, the translator will have enough time to work on your job. Give your translator enough time to make a quote.
• Pay per word, if you have to, but don’t impose your word price to him/her. Ask him/her for a fair price calculation. This takes into account an optimized pre-translation: some pre-translations are good enough for editing, some will be a waste of time and translation from scratch is much better. Just making this rough split and applying a word rate on each part, will help him/her to feel sure her/his estimate is correct and safe. The price for the job, will allow him/her to spend enough time on your job.
• Pay per job & accept a post-calculation: no matter what tool the translator uses, there will always be unexpected problems in a text. If you have ever translated yourself, or followed a translation training, you’ll know what they are. You can’t detect them by just browsing through the text. You can’t extract them upfront. You only discover them as you go. Any professional translator will handle them with care. But if (s)he is working under time pressure, the solution (s)he comes up with may not always be the best one. The best one often requires him/her to revisit sentences that (s)he translated before. One modification may trigger a series of extra edits. I therefore always accepted to pay post-calculations in the past. Now I’m only accepting jobs if that possibility exists.

You only have peanuts?

Well, don’t spend it on translators then. You can find freelancers on sites that won’t mind taking your money in return for machine assisted copy & paste work.

Yes, but… Can’t you optimize your job so you can still use your peanuts and get a good, human translator? Yes, you can!

Outsmart buying cheap

• Figure out if you really need everything to be translated.
• Make sure your writers get translation memory matches when they are writing. Too high tech? No: ask them to work on the previous manual and switch Track Changes on. Validate their work before your send it to a translator. If they change too many words for no good reason, don’t accept the change, and tell them why. Teach your writers to see their own work as the start of a long production chain: often they don’t know how changing one word in a sentence, will trigger higher costs for all words in the sentence. Occasionally I’m demonstrating to writers how the translation process works. Most of them had no clue of the bigger picture and their place in the food chain.
• Replace text by images. The IKEA approach does not work for all products, but at least, figure out if it could be done this way. Creating the images will cost you money as well, but as they don’t need to be translated, you’ll save money on the translation.
• Link to a YouTube video. Many good instruction videos don’t even need a voice-over or texts. Making a video, as I have learned on The Open Mic, does have other benefits as well.

If you ask consultants, they will probably tell you, you can also create your own translation memory, re-use your old translations, and send out only pre-translated jobs. Great idea, IF you know what you’re doing. In my experience (I’m a consultant as well), only translation companies who have in house translators and experienced project managers, and who understand the risks caused by translation memory and machine translation technology, should consider this option. If you are not a professional translation buyer, this kind of technology will make things worse for the translator and it will jeopardize the quality of your translation.

Inexperienced use of technology adds risk to the production process and pushes that risk to the translator, especially when used by greedy people.

So…

All the positive news you hear about artificial intelligence, language bots and technological innovations, should not make you believe human translations can be done without humans. The human translator is still vital, and will be vital in the future as well, for creating high quality translations. Human translators can take into account the context of the text as well as the context of the reader. If you need that kind of quality, pay the translator decently for her/his work. If you doubt my opinion, just try to translate yourself and you’ll see it is hard work. So far not any tool has changed that!