Document Translation Services Singapore have become more predominant in the world of footloose capital, international finance, and financial institutions that straddle multiple continents, and multilingual communication is key to their success. Document Translations Services are crucial to many global businesses in Singapore. For the pharmaceuticals, legal, research and marketing sector, translation has become an important part of their communication strategy to reach out to more people.
Although traditionally, when you think of translation, you will be more inclined to conjure an image of an individual translator working on your translation. However, the massive amount of information churned out daily and the breakneck timeline of modern business means that no individuals, no matter how proficient and fast they are in their translations, can no longer meet such translation demands.
Some businesses even assign translation tasks to their bilingual employees in an effort to save costs. Unfortunately, translation is a task that requires professional translators with years of training and experience. A bilingual individual may know the two languages but is certainly ill-equipped to perform translation accurately, resulting in low productivity and a troublesome translation output that requires more time reworking.
Instead, many are turning to document translation services offered by professional translation companies. Professional translation services have made the once time-consuming and taxing activity more efficient. With most translation companies, the translation work is carried out by certified, trained, and experienced translators proficiently in both the source and target languages.
Document translation services offered by professional translation companies in Singapore produce professionally translated documents that are highly reliable. Document Translation Services in Singapore cover translation for marketing materials, legal documents, business documents and digital contents into and from the language pairs of your choice.
Pricing for Document Translation Services in Singapore
The cost of translation is a very important factor for most businesses. Unfortunately, many who handle translation for the first time tend to think that translation costs cannot be too high. A translator's work can easily be undervalued in a society where many are bilingual. The truth is that the professionalism of a trained and experienced translator is just as high, if not higher, than that of a doctor or a lawyer. It takes many years of training to become a good translator and even more years to gain specialized experience.
The moral of the story is that professionally done translation does not come cheap. Depending on the language pairs, the specialization and service options, translation price can vary quite drastically. Due to the low barriers to entry and the competitive nature of the industry, you can find translation being offered at very low rates. But these, more than often, come with very disappointing results which require more rework.
But how much should you be expecting to pay for professional translation?
As mentioned above, the charges for document translation services depend on the language pairs, the specialization and service options. Some translation companies charge by characters, words, pages, or even hourly. The default would be charging by per word rate based on the source text.
As most source documents are in text format, quoting word-wise price is a fair method of calculating the translation cost. In Singapore, you can expect to pay anything between $0.10 to $0.35 per word/character depending on the language pairs, the specialization and the service options. Most translation technology deployed by translation companies also uses word/character count as a default to identify repetitions and translation matches.
Document Translation Service Options
There are several options offered for document translation services based on your requirements and your budget:
Translation Only: Only the first draft of the translation will be provided. A professional human translator does the translation without further editing work provided. This cheaper option involves a human translator but does not come with any quality assurance element. This service is best for translation that is meant for internal use.
Translation and Revision (Editing and Proofreading) ISO 17100 requirement: This is the default requirement under the ISO 17100 requirement. The final translation output would be translated and revised by two independent translators. This is the most complete option and the recommended service as it covers the whole spectrum of translation, editing and proofreading, all handled by human translators. This service is best suited for publications and documents requiring high accuracy.
Machine Translation Post Editing (MTPE): A specialized machine translation tool will populate the first round of translation. A human translator will edit the translation for accuracy and context. This service is best suited for high-volume translation required within a short time. This may be the cheapest and fastest option, but the quality level may differ greatly. MTPE works well to translate massive information for research purposes or highly structured and voluminous documents such as user guides and manuals.
Turnaround Time for Document Translation
The rule of thumb is that a translator's daily capacity is between 1000 to 2000 words. Depending on the translator's familiarity with the content, the capacity can be increased further. The reviser's capacity will be between 3000 to 5000 words per day.
For example, if you have a 6000-word document, the turnaround time expected would be:
For translation Only: Between 3 to 4 working days.
For Translation and Revision: Between 4 to 5 working days.
For MTPE: Between 2-3 working days
Please note that this is just a guide and for reference only. The translation company would be able to advise an actual turnaround when presented with the actual source files and translation requirements. The actual turnaround depends on the language pairs, the specialization, the type of documents and the file format.
Confidentiality Assurance
The best thing about working with a professional translation company is that you can sign a non-disclosure agreement with them to safeguard the confidentiality of your information. Most translation companies also require their translator and employees to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
Translation companies with an ISO 17100 certification offer another level up in data and information security. Under the certificate, a mandatory data protection requirement must be in place for confidentiality assurance.
Conclusion
Businesses have many considerations when it comes to document translation. The cost factor is usually the main one, especially for those purchasing translation services for the first time. Those who have worked with translation requirements as part of their job would know that cost, although important, is secondary compared to the quality of the translation output at the end of the day.