Myths of translation agencies: brief excursion

As the life shows, almost every area of business has a sort of myths which serve for growth of sales. For instance, all traders of equipment assure that it is made in Japan, perfume distributors repeat relentlessly that their product is originally from France for sure. Translations agencies are also armed with such "shilling tricks". The most popular of them are follows.

Myth No. 1. Urgent Translation without Quality Deterioration

Sure, you frequently see similar message in translation service advertisements. But this is just a promotional trick which goal is clear: to attract customers. At the best, you would get a rather mediocre translation. You should understand that any, even highly skilled, translator assumes that a translation of text requires relatively often references to support literature. Therefore, any statements about urgent translations without quality deterioration should be taken seriously.

Myth No. 2 Translations into Any Language of the World

This statement is also a little trick, if not to say - exaggeration. Certainly, many agencies do translations not only in the traditional English, German and French. But are those translations of really high quality? Look! Let’s assume that a translation agency has an advertisement offering translations into 50 languages. And it is quite logical that the agency should have many staff translators who know those languages and nearly the same number editors who would monitor the quality of translations done by their colleagues. While some translators may be permanently supplied with work, then what a Swahili translator would do? But his/her salary should be paid every month, irrespective of how many orders are available. What do small companies undertake to solve that issue? They simply send such translation to any translator at hand.

Myth No. 3 Translations of Text of Any Subject

Here the situation is fully similar to the pervious one. As a rule, small agencies forward an order to any translator despite of the fact that there exist some subjects which are known by one or two dozens of people in the world. Only when you give your order to a big agency which have a quite big number of translators on the board, you may be sure that it will get to "right person".

All the above leads us to a conclusion - be careful in choosing translation agencies and do not believe in all that their advertisements say.