Need Express Translation Services? Here Is What You Need to Know

There are situations in everyday business life when not everything goes the way it has been intended. A forgotten paragraph from a foreign language catalog that is scheduled to be printed tomorrow, or some changes in a contract that need to be signed by the overseas client in a few hours. Similar situations are part of our everyday business life. In situations like these, you need express translation services. But how can you be sure that a translation created so fast and under such time pressure is correct? Here are the answers.

Providing express translations requires a special skill set… and specialized technology

It is always optimal to have sufficient time for accurate working processes. But reality simply doesn’t always play along, and we have situations in business life when individual, revolutionary solutions are required. If this concerns translation services, it is always a good idea to have a reliable translation provider at your side to have your back. A translation company such as Teck Language Solutions is prepared to go the extra mile when clients are coping with tough tasks and tight deadlines.

In a situation when you need express translation services, you won’t have the time to find an expert translator with relevant knowledge and experience. You won’t be able to test that knowledge and check whether the professional can keep what he or she has promised. Oftentimes, even if you have an individual at hand, maybe they are just out of capacities or even out of the office.

These are all organizational problems that can be solved with the services of a professional translation agency that has high availabilities, always the right professionals at your disposal, and most importantly, tried and tested translators so that the clients don’t need to worry about quality and professionalism. So, welcome to Teck Language Solutions!

But, there is also another dimension to the challenges you find yourself facing when you need express translation services. Depending on the text amount that needs to be translated within a short period of time, you might encounter serious logistical difficulties as well. If you need, as mentioned in the introductory paragraphs, only a few lines to be translated, chances are your problem can be solved within just a matter of hours. So, if indeed you “only” need a few words translated in a brochure or an edited paragraph in a contract, there is absolutely no need to worry whether these tasks can be completed by the deadline.

The challenges become more complex when huge text amounts need to be translated within shorter than usual time frames. But what is, in this case, “shorter than usual”? When are we talking about express translation services at all?

The definition of express translations

When we are talking about translation services in general, the delivery time is a crucial aspect of quality management. Obviously, different individuals work at different paces, and to maintain consistency in style and terminology, it is ideal if one individual is working on a project. In an ideal world, each project would be completed by one single professional at a normal working pace. Individual translators have sustainable capacities ranging from 1,500 words per day up to 5,000 words per day.

This is the standard situation. You will find professionals in the market who state to have capacities up to 10,000 words per day, but this data is mostly valid only for exceptional cases. You can manage a day or two, working at this pace but in the long term, quality would suffer under such a tempo. Also, psychological pressure would have destructive effects on one person providing such an extreme text amount each day.

If you work together with a translation company, organizational and quality control processes will also affect the delivery time. Depending on the individual situation, the right professionals with the right skill sets and expertise must be assigned to the translation project. The finished translations must be (graphically) edited and the quality must be checked, sometimes at multiple levels. All these tasks will be taken over and controlled by your chosen translation provider, relieving you and your co-workers so that you will be able to concentrate on your core and strategically important business tasks.

So, while a text under 1,500 words can be translated within a business day or, in some cases, even within a matter of hours, a standard delivery time for a text with 1,500-5,000 words would be 2-3 business days. These parameters are valid for basically the overwhelming majority of translation projects in a real-life business situation.

However, as we indicated above, this would only be the case in an ideal world. As you have guessed correctly, we are not living in an ideal world and reality often crosses our plans. So individual solutions, in this case, express translation services must be provided. While express projects can be done in high quality, there are compromises you have to make when you need professional translations below the average time.

The compromises

Providing express translation services is mostly an organizational challenge. If you need it fast, don’t expect professionals to translate or type texts at double or triple the normal speed. This is an unrealistic notion and leads to suboptimal results. The solutions most translation companies use include project management techniques that, while delivering quality results, have their pros and contras.

One popular solution is to divide the project between translators. In this case, it is extremely important to choose professionals that are true experts on the specific fields so that terminology is used correctly and consistently in the whole project. Translation technology, among so-called CAT tools, enable translation companies, such as Teck Language Solutions, to integrate terminology data banks into project files. This way all translators working on a specific project will have the same data about professional terms or individual company terminology. One backlash of this approach is that consistent style suffers. Each person has their own choice of words, and your client might have the feeling that the different chapters in a manual were made by different individuals. But if you are reading a handbook about a machine, style, in this sense, may not play that much of a central role. This is a compromise that might easily be made, so as long as it is ensured that the terminology is uniform and consistent.

How the division of the project is realized among translators depends on the translation company, and there are very different approaches available on the market.

Several companies propagate different AI solutions for express projects. In the past few years, machine translations with post-editing have become more and more popular. Surely there are situations where this approach can be used to provide translation services, but the human reader might have difficulty reading and understanding highly technical texts created this way. And don’t forget, the main reason you order professional translation services is to provide your content in an understandable format to your clients, partners, or suppliers that don’t speak your language at a sufficient level. AI solutions must be regarded critically and with a lot of reservations in 2020, checking the requirements of the individual situations and considering all possible consequences, including legal ones, that might occur as a result of machine-translated texts.

If you order express translation services from Teck Language Solutions, you can always be sure that professional and ethical standards are maintained, and you will receive professional translation services without quality loss. Contact us today for a free quote if your company needs express translation services.