Facing the ever-changing economic environment and increasingly fierce market competition, enterprises need to carefully consider how to enhance the overall competitiveness of their products and services through cost reduction and efficiency improvement. For most large international companies that invest heavily in language services, in order to both reduce costs and maintain a professional brand image through high-quality multilingual content, a more comprehensive and in-depth cost control strategy must be considered.
Best practices for translation cost control
Dealing with the challenge of controlling translation costs, business decision-makers can first optimize internal needs and processes, leveraging lower costs without sacrificing value to achieve more significant actual cost savings:
- Simplify writing: The word count is the most important factor affecting translation costs, especially when translating into multiple target languages. Reducing the source word count will lead a decrease in the total cost. The significance of simplifying the source text lies not only in using more concise language, but more importantly in establishing clear writing standards. By reducing the source word count and organizing content with simpler vocabulary and grammatical structures, the content becomes more readable, and even suitable for machine translation.
- Reuse content: While optimizing the writing strategy, it is more important for companies to focus on internal content management. This ensures that content output by different departments or roles within the organization can be managed and reused in one place, avoiding repeated creation and translation of similiar content due to poor management. This not only wastes costs but also leads to inconsistent styles that affects brand images.
- Align demand and production: Within large international enterprises, there are significant differences in translation requirements from different departments, which is why using appropriate translation production methods can effectively avoid wasting costs without compromising delivery quality. For example, using machine translation for content that is only for internal use or using non-native linguists for translation with lower quality requirements. By conducting more in-depth analysis and matching of demands and production, it is possible to improve cost efficiency with more precision.
- Plan in advance: The vast majority of language service providers set minimum order quantities (MOQ) for translation orders, so if there is no centralized coordination across departments within a company, it means that a large number of translation needs that do not meet the MOQ limit will result in wasted translation costs. For large international companies, controlling and planning translation demands in advance can also reduce or even avoid unnecessary translation cost.
Misconceptions about the value of language
When facing increasing translation costs, a lot of language service decision makers in enterprises may be led by two misconceptions: First, ignoring the overall growth of translation demand and solely focusing on reducing translation costs; second, pursuing a single goal of reducing translation costs and implementing a “lowest price wins” strategy on the service procurement.
It is undeniable that the “lowest price wins” procurement strategy can indeed ensure that companies lock in the lowest possible costs. However, this may actually incur a higher value loss: services obtained at very low prices are likely to be offered in a way far below the required standards. This not only affects user experience which further damages the company's brand image, but can also lead to legal disputes or financial losses. Therefore, in order to avoid this value misconception of language services, companies must break away from price-anchored cost control logic, understand their own demands, benchmark market price trends, and evaluate the cost-effectiveness of language services from a more macro perspective. This will help avoid compromising quality for cost savings and allow professional language services to help businesses expand into international markets.
Conclusion
In an increasingly competitive business environment, controlling translation costs is a challenge for every company on the way to globalization. However, whether it is from internal processes, content, or different management strategies, companies can reduce translation costs by implementing a series of methods. Most importantly, companies must establish a stable and long-term partnership with professional language service providers that not only offer high-quality translation services but also provide customized solutions to reduce translation costs. High-quality language services do not stop at delivery but start creating more value from delivery.
