The Quality Compromise

The localization industry is changing. As demand for translations increase and the market becomes more saturated with translation professionals, clients look for ways to cut costs and businesses are forced to compete by lowering their pricing. Will lower prices mean lower localization quality? Does the fight to compete with the lowest price drive quality right out of the market?

Localization can be very expensive. There are many steps involved to release a product in another language, without errors. Foreign DTP professionals have to make sure the new text fits into the allotted space, localization engineers have to test functionality, translators must change each word one by one and then localization testing needs to be performed to ensure quality. If you skip a step, you risk that you will release a product, create an advertisement or give out marketing materials that don’t make sense in the target language. Then your business looks bad and you risk embarrassment and a loss of new customers.

In a free market high price doesn’t always mean high quality, but as a client you expect the best quality from the highest price. The same way people expect more when they buy a Ferrari. No, not everyone has the money to buy a Ferrari, but if given a choice, they notice the difference when they drive a Ferrari compared to a mass brand, for instance. The Ferrari interior is sewn by hand and the engine is meticulously put together by people, not on an assembly line by machines. However, a Kia serves the same function as the Ferrari and it will get them where they need to go without the added expense. If you are translating a product and you cut corners, native speakers won’t take your product seriously, they may in fact avoid buying your product because of poor translation. In Italy I recently saw a billboard advertisement for a large American hotel conglomerate, in Italian. In big letters the ad described the 5 reasons why you should stay in their hotels. The word five was spelled incorrectly and the sentence was poorly constructed. Now the name of the hotel chain is ingrained in my head because of the mistake so I will purposely avoid staying there.

In some cases, it might be ok to release a translation that isn’t perfect. When you see a button to translate a web page, you know it is going through machine translation and that it won’t be perfect. We’ve come to expect the translation mistakes. People are looking for main ideas from these websites, so a perfect translation is not necessary. But if you have an idea that you want to get across to your customers, relying on machine translation is risky. Machine translation always needs editing, without it, you risk releasing a half-finished unprofessional product out into the market.

So what is the answer? How is it possible to save money and receive a precise, hand-sewn translation? Is machine translation and post editing the right answer to your needs? First ask yourself why you are localizing your product and if a perfect translation is necessary. If it is, make the investment; treat your customers to a ride in a Ferrari and they will reward you for the treatment.