How to pick the right freelancer for a translation project?
Note: To keep the text more neat, everywhere a pronoun ‘he, his, him‘ is used, it is meant as ‘he/she, his/her, him/her‘
In the last article about the difference between freelancers and agencies I promised to write something about how to choose the right one. Let’s say you have decided to use a freelancer for your project. (Agency picking comes later.)
Now before we start, let me explain about what we’re not going to talk here. There’s been a lot of news recently about the machine translation and how it is awesome and the progress made on that front and how it can be customized and utilized to such degree that the result would be ‘good enough‘. Well, all of us in the translation industry are really excited about that and it’s pretty much the no.1 topic for discussions these days. Nevertheless in this article we’re going to look for freelancers for the good-old-fashioned projects, where ‘good enough‘ is not good enough and the client is looking for a native-like quality. Another thing we’ll not be talking about just now(maybe next article) is where to look for these translators.
What we will try to examine are the areas we need to consider while choosing the translator.
Let’s start right away by listing these areas:
LANGUAGE COMPETENCE:
Ideally you want a translator who has studied translation and the target language. Or any other way that could prove his excellent command of language(huge experience, references,…) Also, and this is very important: use a native translator who is living in the target country at the moment. One of the main reasons for it is the difference between translation and localization. A native is much more likely to localize the text in opposition to just ‘translating’ it. See article on Lionbridge’s blog on translation vs localization: http://bit.ly/dmZqra
SUBJECT COMPETENCE:
Now you do not want only a good linguist, you’ll also want to have an expert in the subject matter of your project. This is where things start to get complicated. There’s not many translators who are expert linguists and at the same time experts in many different areas. Let’s take for example Medical translations. How many linguists have you met, who are doctors at the same time?
Many times you have to barter between language and subject competence. In that case have the more language competent translator do the translation and the more subject competent translator(or even not a translator) do the review.(some future article has to be about loaclization process)
IT COMPETENCE:
Now you found a very good translator, both expert in linguistics and subject matter, but there’s a slight problem elsewhere. Your guy can barely turn on the computer, use MS word and access his e-mail. But in order to translate your project he has to use your special online interface, maybe install some software, probably your documents contain heavy formating, tags, metadata, etc.
In other words, unless you don’t want to be unpleasantly surprised by getting back corrupted files or at least a ton of questions about obvious-to-IT-competent-person, make sure he is IT competent.
TOOLS AVAILABLE:
This can be a sub-category of IT competence. Questions you should be asking are if he has the CAT tools needed for the job or if he’s willing to learn to work with new tools.
AVAILABILITY: just briefly(for more check the last article – http://bit.ly/aVMsHv)
Is he going to be available for possible reviews? What are his working hours?(don’t forget to count with timezone). How much is he able to translate per day? Is he going to be flexible to sudden changes in the project scope, schedule, instructions, etc.. Is it likely that he will be around let’s say in half a year?
COMMUNICATION:
Much can be written about communication. For now just ask yourself if the translator is communicative in a way that he replies in a timely manner and to the point.
EXPERIENCE:
Now this is easy. The more experienced he is, the better. Check about his completed projects, his references, years in business,etc..
METHOD OF PAYMENT:
What kind of payment does the translator accept? Bank transfer, paypal,..?
Does he charge by words or by pages or hours? You definitely want to pay per source word.
RATE:
Last of all(but difinitely not least), once all criteria for your project are met, you just go ahead and choose the ‘cheapest‘ translator;). It may be that the cheapest already does fit all your needs perfectly in which case hooray, you can proceed with contacting him. Anyway, usually you will not be so lucky and to save some money from your budget you’ll have to make some sort of compromise by sacrificing certain ‘qualities‘ from the above list. I suggest you go sactrificing from bottom points upward until you meet your budget requirements.
References:
If you’re in doubt, check out his references to verify the above statements.
What do you think? Did I miss something important?
