Preparing your document and saving money

Saving on translation costs can be as easy as preparing your document for the translation process. Here are just a few steps that you can take in advance to save money when requesting your translation services.

The first think that you can do is to delete all the empty spaces from the document. Most programs used to count the words or lines in a document to calculate your translation costs will count an empty space as a character. This leads to you paying more money. By erasing these empty spaces prior to submitting your document for a quote ensures that you are by no means paying for these empty spaces.
Send an edible document not a PDF. PDF documents have to be converted. This can lead to bad formatting, inaccurate calculation of word or line count and a lot of empty spaces referred to in the above. If you do not own an editable version, it is advantageous to convert the document yourself and make sure that it is the format that you want before it gets translated. By doing the conversion in advance, you are also going to save time, not only the time it takes to do the translation, but the time it takes to receive your quotes, especially if submitting to numerous offices. In addition you are assured to save money, seeing that if you do the conversion, you cannot be charged desktop publishing (DTP) costs. Keep in mind that many offices, even if they do not actively charge you for DTP costs, they sometimes charge you indirectly for the time without you knowing it. (By claiming there are more words or lines than there really are for example.) If you do have to submit PDF, ask your translation office to send the conversion that was used to calculate how many words or lines there are in the document. Subsequent to this, you can make arrangements on what you expect as a delivery as well as ensure that calculation was carried out properly. If the conversion of the document is good, you can bargain with your office on NOT paying a fee.
If you have old translations that are intact and well formatted in both the source and target languages, keep in mind that alignments are not difficult and can sometimes save a lot of money. An alignment is nothing more than compiling a translation memory from old translation documents. You take the source and target languages and pair them into a translation memory with an appropriate program. In addition, after finishing the alignment and the final translation, you can ask for the translation memory in order to save money on future translation costs and ensure the quality and consistency you desire. Check out this blog later when I discuss what a translation memory is in full detail.