A New Look at an Old Question: Why Use an Agency?

Tina Wuelfing Cargile PMP, Account Manager

The client who wrote these words is not a translation professional. Still, her organization assigned her the task of verifying the languages and text for the labeling and packaging of a new product, one that would ship to a multitude of locales.

As a translation and localization company, we take pride and satisfaction in our willingness and ability to rescue such clients from what can be an uninvited, unwelcome, and frequently baffling project nightmare. Of course, we also work with many client-side translation professionals. These client professionals bring years of experience and accumulated wisdom to the localization process.

Either way, the “agency question” can and does arise: if an organization has invested resources in creating and training a translation department or even a single knowledgeable point-of-contact, why incur additional expenses by securing the services of an outside agency?

The job is basically a matter of perusing translators’ résumés, determining fields of expertise and levels of experience, and then going forward with the translation step. Right? A closer look at the details will reveal that many benefits can be gained from the services of an experienced translation vendor.

What Can an Agency Offer?

A significant advantage to using a translation agency is the vendor’s experience and access to translation professionals: The heart of the translation process resides with the translator. Finding the time involved to evaluate and select translators is difficult enough for a translation user, the tougher challenge, however, is developing the evaluation and selection criteria from scratch. Some of these criteria include:

Accreditation or certification
Technical or educational background
Availability and scheduling
Ability to work within your application
Access to compatible translation tools
Accessibility (Able to use FTP? Able to receive overnight packages? Nine hours ahead of you?)

Which of these criteria should carry the most weight? It depends on the project.

Agencies are in the business of determining the best translators for your project:

This means that the agency might assume additional work and time to ensure that translators best qualified for the project are assigned. For example, a translator who might be the best match for your project might be unable to work in your application, might be traveling and only reachable via cyber cafes, or might not be degreed in the subject matter in question, but might have years of experience in the subject.

Agencies also have clout that most clients don’t have: Only a handful of companies have internal translation departments whose structure and activities mirror an agency’s. Chances are you don’t schedule translations on a continuous basis. Agencies do, and that equates to leverage when competing for resources.

Translation agencies know from experience which matches were made in heaven and which were not: Translators are human. They are professionals and are justifiably proud of their skills. However, they also have individual philosophical approaches to their craft. They might or might not work well with others—or at least with some others.

The best translator for the project and the best reviewer for the project might clash on issues of style, word choice, or even personality. You likely will discover this when faced with pages of complete rewrites, passionate outbursts, and conflicting opinions. A good agency knows from experience which combinations of personnel will yield effective reviews and efficient processes. Additionally, in worst-case scenarios, an agency can call in any number of additional consultants to mediate differences.

Agencies have immediate access to additional resources: Again, translators are human. They can fall ill, have family emergencies, or over-commit. How quickly would you be able to reassign work if one or more of the translators you had invested your time in recruiting dropped out of the picture? What if the scope of work suddenly increased? An agency would have skilled professionals available to ramp up and immediately allocate to the project.

Agency project managers can filter questions and manage the exchange of information. The time involved in fielding translator questions and exchanging information is frequently the most time-consuming part of the translation process.

Apart from handling the purely administrative task of distributing information—which may involve midnight phone calls to Russia, plus knowing which courier delivers to that small town in Argentina in fewer than five days, and knowing when the translator traveling in Mexico will check in at a cyber café—an agency’s editorial department is likely able to field many of the questions that inevitably arise. The probability and volume of those translator questions, missing and essential reference materials, and revisions to source text can be expected to increase exponentially with the number of translators, reviewers, and editors working on the project.

Agencies can organize and manage your in-country review. Almost no one who isn’t a full-time translation manager has enough time for the tasks associated with in-country review. While in-country reviews can go smoothly, experience shows the following:

Your Instructions to In‑country Reviewers	What You Actually Receive from In‑country Reviewers
Do not rewrite or editorialize source text.	Six additional paragraphs of translated text that do not correspond to the source text
Use revision tracking.	A rewritten document with no change tracking
Do not rename electronic files.	A file named DOCUMENT.doc with no indication of the language/locale of the sender
Do not handwrite revisions.	Several blotchy faxed pages with microscopically small handwritten comments
Coordinate your review with your colleagues and send only one edited document.	Two, or possibly three, separate emails from different individuals in Spain, all of whom disagree with the others’ changes
Send a finished electronic file as an email attachment.	A text-format email written in the target language, lacking accents, and containing a general critique of quality with no specific suggestions

Translation agencies have access to tools and have experience using them: A localization tool specialist can bridge the gap between theory and practice. The specialist develops an ongoing relationship with the product support staff, helping ensure that tools are utilized properly and that problems are solved quickly and efficiently.

Agencies also have language savvy graphic arts professionals on site: Practitioners of multilingual desktop publishing occupy an important niche in the graphic arts industry, and deservedly so. The graphic challenges inherent in translation are beyond the experience of most art departments, challenges involving text expansion, font support, varying operating systems, and culturally appropriate graphics.

Having such professionals on board and available during the planning and execution of the project can make the difference between a successful project and one that fails to deliver on time. These professionals have the experience to ask the right questions. For example, an experienced localization graphic artist will know that simply checking that Arabic reads from right to left does not necessarily mean that it is displaying correctly.

Translation agencies have editorial resources trained to detect problems in target language text: Their editorial staff is trained in the stylistic conventions of target language text and in reviewing such text for omissions and additions. Untrained English-speaking proofreaders and editors might introduce errors into a finished product by assumptively removing spaces before colons in a French translation, or by changing the words in a Spanish subheading to initial caps, or by converting commas back into English decimal points in many languages.

Steps to a Successful Partnership

Once the decision to collaborate with an agency is made, how should one be selected? Beyond pricing, turnaround time, and references, it is worthwhile to explore the following issues:

What is included in the price per word?
Will you be working with someone who understands you?
If you are a project manager, will there be a counterpart at the agency? Will the counterpart be available to you on a continuing basis?
Can the agency provide the reporting metrics you require? What type of project tracking tools does it use, and how quickly and effectively can it provide updates?
What kind of post-project support is available?

Your vendor should be willing and able to assist you in ensuring that the end user is satisfied with the linguistic quality, the interface, and usability.

How Clients Can Help

The probability of a successful partnership with a translation vendor can be improved by providing the following:

A clear picture of project goals, including how you expect to process the work, a definition of the end user, what resources are available (operating system, font support, applications, and so on), and whether you plan an in-country review.
Your timeline, with interim milestones, padding for dealing with the unexpected, and flexibility.
Well-organized, logically named, and clearly identified source electronic files, with any corresponding hardcopies also neatly matched.
Reference material, including visual references, English glossaries, existing translation memories or glossaries, manuals, and when appropriate, an English version of the software being localized.
Your expectations regarding project status updates and reporting, and in what format you would prefer to receive them.

Conclusion

Clients have varying levels of experience: from the inexperienced non-volunteer who requires guidance to escape translation disaster to the sophisticated professional who nodded sagely throughout this article. Both can benefit from developing a relationship with a translation agency. Indeed, for most organizations in most scenarios, the value add of an agency, which goes far beyond the realm of translation broker, is worth the investment.

Author's Biography: Tina Wuelfing Cargile is an account manager and certified PMP (Project Management Professional) with eighteen years experience in the translation industry.