One Stop Shop Translations: Your Spanish Translation Quote – Tips and Advice

One Stop Shop Translations: Your Spanish Translation Quote – Tips and Advice: Choosing the correct translation services is often a very difficult and time consuming. These days there are thousands of freelancers, agenc...

Preparing for the Hispanic Market

More and more companies are translating their web content and commercial collateral into Spanish. Is this a coincidence?
Of course not, the importance of the Hispanic and Spanish markets should not be underestimated partly due to the fact that the vast majority of this active and expanding market is Spanish speaking only. Below we will discuss some of the more detailed facts of the Spanish market.
Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, in fact, after English it is the second most widely spoken language in the world with regard to commercial communication and the third most used on the Internet.
It is estimated that in three generations 10% of the world population will be Spanish speaking and that by the year 2040 the largest Spanish speaking population in the world will be in the united States of America with Mexico next.
Spanish is the second most studied language in the world with 20 million students mainly due to its growing importance in the commercial sector.
All the above points give us some idea as to why so many companies are translating all their commercial collateral into Spanish to take advantage of this huge growing market.
Here are some astonishing facts about the US Hispanic market alone.
• The Hispanic population is expected to account for 44% of the total US population growth before the year 2020 and 62% from 2020 to 2050. By 2050 the current Hispanic population of 44 million is expected to double.
• The average age of the Spanish population is 29 years old.
• Hispanic owned businesses increased 78% between 1985 and 2000.
• The Hispanic market accounted for over 600 billion USD in consumer spending last year.
In these uncertain times where the developed markets are saturated its important to open doors to other opportunities such as the Spanish speaking market. Moreover, translating into Spanish not only opens the door to the Hispanic US market but to another 21 countries in the world that have Spanish as their official language.

Its also important to note that the translation of websites and commercial material is not a straight cut deal where one simply asks the first Translation services company they find to translate everything into Spanish because they are cheap. While the Hispanic market may not be as developed as more established markets, corporate image is still a huge factor in breaking into these markets. Intertwined with Corporate image is the need for quality translation as in most cases a poor quality translation is worse than no translation at all and can destroy the public image of the entity in question. This is why it is so important to hire a translation services company that has experience in providing high quality work in the particular area of expertise in question while also fitting into the companies budget criteria. When requesting a translation quote there is usually a wide range of translation price differences one has to ask why some translation services are so much cheaper than others.
Most of the larger multinationals are already taking this expansion into the Spanish speaking market very seriously but for a lot of the medium and smaller sized companies it is a shame to lose such an opportunity especially in such challenging times?

If you like this post please "like" or "share" for more content

Mark Kieran, CEO, One Stop Shop Translations

For more information on our Spanish translation services click on this link or get an economically unbeatable Spanish translation quote here.

Your Spanish Translation Quote – Tips and Advice

Choosing the correct translation services is often a very difficult and time consuming. These days there are thousands of freelancers, agencies, directories, software and methodologies. To add to this, the difference in the Spanish translation quotes from agency to agency can vary greatly. This mish-mash of decisions make it very difficult for a person to be happy with the choice they have made and may make them always wonder what they may be missing.
The aim of this article is to aid the reader to make informed decisions when purchasing translation services. The article touches many translation issues and hopefully some will be applicable to you the reader when making a safe decision.

The core resource of translation is course the translator. Let’s take a scenario where we have a friend who is bi-lingual in Spanish and English and a medical patent to translate from English to Spanish. Easy, he’s a friend and he’s cheap although he has no translation experience. Wrong, the consequences of choosing this resource, although cheap, could be disastrous. Every particular field of translation requires particular skills. In this case where we have a medical patent translation the translator needs to have grounding in medical science and be up to date with the latest medical terminology. In addition, they must also be experienced in writing in the particular style of medical patents, something which is learned over years of practice. At One Stop Shop we have medical patent translators with PHDs in fields such as chemistry, biology and biotechnology and years of experience translating in these particular fields. Even within the Medical or life Sciences field a translator with education and experience in chemistry would be a much better choice, than for instance a translator with a background in Biology, for the translation of a drug patent. It must also be emphasized that your translations should be handled by professionals. A good translator is a linguist, they have studied the art of translation, specialized in the language combination and fields they are most suited to and built up years of knowledge and experience. A linguist also has to mold the Spanish translation for an international audience meaning that the language must be neutral and not have any slang or regionalisms.

Some people may query the importance of being so selective when choosing a translator, after all, it’s only translation but take the example of the drug patent which is written by a chemist. To the average lay person the patent is double Dutch. The patent will only be understood by peers in the industry. This is why peers in the Spanish speaking drug patent field deserve to receive a high quality translation from a translator with grounding and experience translating drug patents regardless of the translation price.
The image of the company depends on it. A poor quality translation will cause untold damage within your industry and affect your standing within this industry.

Some clients may say that they have this great software that translates automatically. One thing to bear in mind that machine translation is only approximately 60-70% accurate, the rest of the fine tuning needs human intervention. While machine translation is good for informal translations and getting the general gist of something, professional translation that represents the image of the company requires a human. Then a client may say to edit the machine translation thus saving up to 70% of the costs. The reality is that a professional translation agency or translator will probably refuse to do this as editing a machine translation involves re-writing the whole translation and may involve more work than starting the translation from scratch.

The next question is whether to use a freelancer or a translation agency? The main question is what the difference is. With an agency the text is revised which is why the translation quote tends to be more expensive. The main advantage to having the text revised is that it is better to have a “second eye”. No matter how good the translator they are bound to make errors from time to time and in this respect, the revision cycle is like an extra safety net to eradicate these simple errors providing a higher quality translation.

To summarize, here are a few questions to ask oneself, before deciding on the translation service to use:
• Is the translator experienced and qualified in this particular field. Ask for a profile of the translator or better still ask for a sample of profiles and decide on the best fit
• Why is the translation so cheap from this agency? In some cases the translation rate may not include revision, hence the reduced fee. The translator may not be fully qualified either and cheaper to sub-contract.
• Does the Translation Agency use the latest Translation memory technology? This is very useful in the case of updates. The previous translation is re-used and hence reduces costs and ensures consistency.

Translation Quotes and the Hidden Costs

Translation Quotes and the Hidden Costs


The world of translation can be quite misleading at the best of times but especially when it comes to the quoting process. The problem with translation quotes is that there is no standard for pricing the work. Some companies quote by line, others by line or character and others by word. Usually, the most reliable form to receive the quote is priced by word. Apart from being the easiest to count, it is the unit used with Translation Memory technology. The following article will help the discerning client to understand the translation quote process and awaken them to the possible hidden costs of translation.

Translation Memories

We mention Translation Memory technology as this has a significant impact on the cost of a translation. A translation memory, or TM, is a database that stores so-called "segments", which can be sentences or sentence-like units (headings, titles or elements in a list), that have been previously translated. A translation-memory system stores the words, phrases and paragraphs that have already been translated and aid human translators. The translation memory stores the source text and its corresponding translation in language pairs called “translation units”.

When translating later versions of collateral (software, documentation, multimedia etc.) the previously translated version can be re-cooped from the translation memory to significantly reduce the cost of the translation. In some cases a translation asset can be up to 80% translated already. Some companies do not offer this technology but the ones that do often charge different rates for the words that are 100% matching or already translated. While this is a normal practise, as the 100% matching strings need to be checked in any case, it is wise to be weary of this cost as the rates differ per agency.

Also, some documents like legal documents and software can be very repetitive. In normal practise these repeated words should be charged at the same rate as 100% matching words, however, in a lot of cases the client never sees these benefits.

Other Costs

Some quotes will not contain other costs and the client must ask himself:
• Is the VAT included?
• Does the quote include a project management fee and if not is there one? A lot of translation agencies will charge up to a 10% project management fee.
• Is revision included in the price per word translation rate? A lot of agencies will have a cheaper rate as there is no revision on the translation itself. The client has to ask oneself quality or price is more important.

These are just some of the pitfalls facing the client when requesting the quote. In all cases it is best to send the documents to the clients for quotation and shop around. Ask for the same quote from different translation agencies to draw your own conclusions.
Why not? It’s up to you to get the best value for your own money?

Spanish translation Differences

Like popular European languages such as Italian and French, Spanish is derived from Latin. However, we must also bear in mind that other languages such as French and Arabic have had a strong influence on the Spanish language. When Spanish explorers "discovered" Latin America, the Spanish language used by the early settlers evolved into a distinctive dialect of Spanish with its own flavour and style. This new dialect of Spanish married the European and South American cultures to become what is generally called South American Spanish. Latin American Spanish is now spoken all over South America in places such as Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile and Ecuador with each country again having it's own specific nuances and dialects.

The differences between Latin American Spanish and European Spanish are in many respects similar to the differences between American and English meaning that Latin American Spanish speakers and European Spanish speakers have no difficulties understanding each other. The major differences between the two spoken dialects are as follows:

Spaniards tend to pronounce the z and the c before i or e like the "th" in "thick," while many Latin Americans pronounce it as the s. Also, some South Americans and in Argentina in particular, often pronounce the ll and y like the "s" in "measure." They also tend to drop s sounds, so está sounds like etá. In parts of South America, the j sounds like the "ch" in "loch" while in others it sounds like the English "h." Finally, the l and the r at the end of a word can sometimes sound alike. All of these pronunciation differences coupled with a slower pace and softer tone when speaking Latin American Spanish enable is to tell very easily where someone is from.

When it comes to South American Spanish translation and Spanish translation the differences are again very subtle and a Spaniard will generally have no problems understanding a South American text but there are some differences on grammar and vocabulary making it more logical to employ a native South American Spanish translator to translate texts specific to a particular South American market.
On grammar, two of the major differences that the Spanish translator will take into consideration are the leísmo of Spain and the use of the pronoun vos in some areas instead of tú. Secondly, vosotros is often used as the plural of tú (the singular familiar "you") in Spain, while in Latin American ustedes is used.
Vocabulary is where the major differences lie and can differ vastly even within South America emphasising again the importance of hiring a translator native to a particular locale or market. As they say there is no substitute for local knowledge.

Here are some of the misunderstandings that can arise from not hiring a native speaking translator to a specific market.

A Spanish translator may translate "to step on" as "pisar" while this maybe understood as "to have sex" in Latin American Spanish. A Spanish translator may translate "car" as "coche" while this maybe understood as "baby stroller" in Latin American Spanish. A "lápiz" is a pencil or crayon everywhere, but a "lapicero" is a pencil holder in some areas, a mechanical pencil in others, and a ball-point pen in others. There are also a number of blatant differences, such as a computer being an "ordenador" in Spain but a "computadora" in Latin America. Even within Latin Spanish we have the example where a Chinese restaurant is called a "chifa" in Peru and Chile but this word is very uncommon in other dialects of South American Spanish.

All in all, when sub-contracting your translation services for Latin Spanish do your research and ensure that your translator is not only a native South American Spanish translator but also native to the particular area/locale for which your text is being translated.