Translation Survey – HI-COM
Three weeks ago, HI-COM launched a survey to help companies & entrepreneurs better organize their translation tasks and improve their multilingual communication.
Thank you all for taking part in our survey about how to manage your translation needs.
The questions were:
- What’s your company size?
- How are your translations handled?
- Which is the main department / person in charge of your translation projects?
- When translating content, what are your priorities?
- For what kind of content do you need translations the most?
- How many translation suppliers do you use?
- Are you confident with using machine translation (e.g. Google Translate) for documents intended for external use, and do you think machine translation is sufficient for your needs?
- Did you know that is possible to save time and money on translations by using technology that detects and stores certain repeated content in a document so that you only pay for it once?
Check out the results here:
From this survey there are many important takeaways :
1) 40% of companies use internal resources for their translation tasks. This means that the translations are handled by employees originally hired to perform other tasks. Therefore, they are not qualified translators. Translations handled by non-professionals may give others a poor impression of your work. But also, may end up harming your brand’s reputation. This is why working with professional translators will help your company target a wider audience. By speaking their languages, it’s important to not have mistakes or misunderstandings.
2) Marketing is the department that needs translations the most!
With Social Media and the development of the e-commerce industry, it is no longer enough to have your digital content available in just one language. If your aim is to target a higher number of potential customers, you must have more than one language.
3) Therefore, 70% of companies do not believe that MT (such as Google Translate) are sufficient for their needs. This proves that people are aware of how poorly MT such as Google Translate compares to translations by a professional agency. Otherwise, Google Translate can be used for basic sentences. For more complex material such as creatively written content, it’s impossible to replace a professional translator.
4) 60% of companies did not know that using certain translation tools can help them save time & costs for their translation needs. For example In fact, software is available that can help you save time & money by storing repeated words and sentences in a translation ‘memory’, meaning that you only pay for these sentences once instead of a number of times. Certain documents include many identical sentences. The, tools such as these will help you get your translations done faster, and with lower costs. Of course, the larger the project, the more likely such savings can be made. For example, when translating and localizing a large web site, repeated content can represent as much as 50% of the site.
5) In conclusion, 26% of companies need technical translations, which can be tricky if you don’t use professional translators.
HI-COM provides professional interpreting services (simultaneous interpreting,consecutive interpreting etc.) translation services and copywriting in more than 40 languages. With the offices in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Sofia-Antipolis (South of France), HI-COM provides highly professional interpreting and translation services in Europe and Asia.
In addition, HI-COM provides reliable and cost-effective Interpreting, translation, localisation and copywriting services, with a network of highly skilled, qualified and experienced multi-linguists. For more information, please get in touch.