How to make your translator fall in love with you

After a long excursion into the use of machine translation and artificial intelligence in language services, ranging from translation to copywriting, I would like to finally return to my short series about commissioning translations.

In previous posts, I have described how to find a suitable translator for your project and how to prepare your texts. Once you have taken all these steps, there are some things that should be mentioned when you first send an enquiry. The most important ones are listed below, but there might be further questions from the translator of your choice.

About you

First of all, translators (and interpreters, of course) like to know who is sending them work. This could be you as a private client who needs personal documents translated, or the company in whose name you are commissioning a translation.

Core data

The most important (but not text-related) data is of course your name (as point of contact for this project), the name of the company and the area of expertise of your company, but only where this is relevant for the translation project. A short introduction in one or two sentences is sufficient.

Later on, after successful negotiations, the translator will also ask for your address to be able to issue an invoice.

Further information

Especially when the materials to be translated are of advertorial nature, providing examples will help increase the quality of the translation. One great source of help could be the link to your company website, where the translator can find out more about what the company does. For more supporting materials, check out the “reference materials” section below.

About the text

The next step is all about providing more background information about the project itself. They are at least as important as the text itself and the more (relevant) information your translator receives, the better the result.

Language combination

This language pair consists of the language of the text to be translated and the language of the translation. That means: what is the original language and which language(s) would you like to have it translated into?

Audience and purpose

Who will be reading the translation and what is the aim of the text? Is it there to spark interest in a certain topic, to motivate the reader to buy a product or is it a user manual telling the reader how to operate a device?

Form of publication

Where will the translation be published? In which format or medium? Will it be a newsletter, a marketing email, website content or a blog post? Or a high-gloss brochure? All these factors influence wording, sentence structure and other language aspects, which vary from language to language and from platform to platform.

Length and delivery date

How long is the text and when would you like it back? If you are not in a rush, it is of course perfectly fine to ask the translator for their estimated delivery date, but we are always happy about receiving guidance on the urgency of a project.

Please keep in mind: good translations take time. A twenty-page document will not be back in your inbox by the next morning.

Delivery format

Would you like the file back in the same (file) format in which you sent it to the translator? Would you like the translation to be placed underneath the original, as a side-to-side view in a table or would you prefer the translator to overwrite the original?

Scope of service

Which level of service are you looking for? This largely depends on the impact the text will have—is it for internal use only or is it customer-facing? Do you want just a translation which you will be checking yourself? Or a translation including proofreading by a competent second pair of eyes? Do you also need the translation formatted, converted into a different document type or other related services? And would you like your translator to create additional materials, such as a company-specific glossary?

 

Please do not forget to also provide the text to be translated, so the translator can have a look at it and judge its difficulty.

A helping hand

Last but not least, translators appreciate what we call reference materials. They help us find the right tone and wording for our translations.

Reference materials

Such reference materials include, if available, glossaries, background information about the topics or products in the text (e.g. in the form of links to product pages on your website or a product catalogue), the complete text in the case of the translations of excerpts, previous translations (ideally including their original texts for comparison) or a style guide. I am of course aware that you might not (yet) have such materials at hand, but the translator of your choice is usually happy to help you to create them.

Query contact

Queries about texts are very common. They are not a reason for concern—on the contrary! They show that your translator is looking closely at the material and taking note of subtle details. And for this, we need a reliable point of contact, ideally with name, email and phone number (as well as times when they can be contacted and the preferred way of contacting them).

Example

To give you an idea of what an email during initial contact might look like, I have drafted a quick example for you:

 

Dear Ms Aichinger,

I hope you are well.

I am Jane Doe from the furniture manufacturer Placeholder Ltd. We found your website online and would like to enquire about having our 15-page brochure translated from English into German (see attachment).

You can find out more about us on our website paceholder-furniture.com. We have been in the furniture business for over 20 years and are now planning to expand our business to the DACH region. Our target audience are young people furnishing their first flat and we are planning to publish this brochure both in print as well as digitally on our website.

Since we have been dealing exclusively with the UK market so far, I am unfortunately unable to provide previous translations. We did however like the following website: Irgendein-moebel.de. Its tone is similar to what we are looking for.

Ideally, we would need the translation back within the next three weeks. Please feel free to just replace the English text in the document with the German version.

If you have any questions, you can contact me by phone (0123/456789) or using this email address.

I am looking forward hearing from you.

Kind regards,
Jane Doe

 

I am aware that this email does not contain all the information listed above, but all the vital parts for a translator: text type and length, audience, languages, references, format, delivery timeframe, a point of contact and the text itself (attached). Your first contact email may, of course, also be much shorter than this, if you just want to find out about the translator’s specialisation and general availability.

Wrapping up

At the end of this series, you are now well-prepared for commissioning your first translation. If you would like a handy check list about text preparation, head over to the downloads section on this website. A check list for the commissioning process will also be added soon.

There is one last thing I would like to add before letting you go: if you send non-editable file formats, like PDFs, translators often add a surcharge for converting them into an editable file format. The reason for this is that the conversion process always creates issues that need correcting before further processing, causing additional effort for the translator.

Do you still have questions about how to commission a translator? Or do you need help finding a competent language professional? Please feel free to contact me; I am looking forward to hearing from you.