With the shrinking world and growing demand for language services, there’s plenty of LSPs to pick from.
How does it work? How do I know which provider is best suited for my needs? What categories should I consider when deciding on LSP? Too many to deal with in one simple blog post. Let’s just deal with one question for now:
Is it better to hire translation agency or a freelance translator?
As usual there’s no simple answer. Everything depends on individual project demands, long-term partnership, budget, deadline, etc.
In my experience there’s but one really important quality that differentiates agency versus freelancers. Not rates, not quality of translation, not communication or technical competence. Sure, common assumption is that freelancers have lower rates and respectively lower quality,etc.
Don’t count on that! There’s enough freelancers more expensive then agencies and enough freelancers delivering better translations than agencies.
So what is the one thing really important in Agency-Freelancer alternative?
IMHO it’s availability(in it’s broadest sense).
That means if you have small to medium sized projects with a favourable schedule and buffer go ahead and find quality freelancer (Hopefully I’ll write a future blog about that)
In cases of large projects or tight deadlines or basically any project that needs to be divided between more translators – use agency. Find one most suitable for the job.(Another candidate for future blog post)
This goes also for ongoing long-term projects. If there’s a prediction that the volume of work will exceed capabilities of a single translator or that there will be need for unannounced emergency quick updates with minimal turnaround, start cooperating with agency.
Good news is that there are all kinds of agencies, from 2 person little companies to multinational colloses with thousands of employees. If you know how to search them, you’ll definitely find a right fit to meet your budget and quality requirements.
Do you have similar opinion? What’s your experience with freelancers/agencies? Maybe you’d just like to contribute a bit of constructive criticism. Please do!
I answers our question. I do not have experience with freelancers at all and I do not trust agencies quite a lot. Your short article gave me some insight into this topic… thumb up!
Good points, Oldrich! My two cents: the main value of using an agency is that it provides project management services – coordinating between multiple translators/agencies, consolidating instructions and queries, managing file transfers, etc.
If it’s a multilingual LSP, it does that for multiple languages – taking this burden off the client.
The main difference as I see it – agencies scale, while individual freelancers don’t.
Looking forward to reading more of your thoughts about localization business.
P.S. Honored to be on your list of favorite blogs – I am in a good company, it seems!
@LM thanks and stay tuned for more;)
@Jenia exactly. Scalability is other word for it. Actually, originally I had instead “availability(in it’s broadest sense)” – “availability(including scalability, presumption that the agency will be around in the future,etc.)”. Anyway I’m not really happy about the article, cos it may be understood that it focuses only on one aspect and does not give much weight to all important others. But on the other hand I think that’s the way with all articles, unless somebody writes an all-encompassing zillion words tretise on everything.