The vision of our translation agency
Before the beginning of the new millennium, the internationalization of companies has always required huge investment into translation agencies and sometimes they were unprofitable.
The onset of globalization has made the distances between different parts of the planet meaningless, bringing in contact remote populations and creating a vital business opportunity.
This has led to an exponential growth in the volume of content that had to be translated in other languages (web sites, blogs, packaging, documentation, etc.) and consequently in the number of translation agencies and (more or less) professional single translators offering language services.
The recent global economic crisis has pushed businesses worldwide to slash production costs, in order to lower the final prices and stay competitive on the new global market.
Consequently, more and more translation agencies have turned to mother tongue professional translators with progressively lower cost and experience, starting a price war in the translation market – where the customer chooses the translation agency according to “translation cost” – supposing that the (maximum) quality of the translation service is implied in any case. It is obviously an unreal hypothesis, since the choice of a junior translator implies lower price and lower quality.
However, since the customer is often not able to measure the gap between the quality he expected and that which he really paid for, the current trend is to lower the translation cost in order to sell more.
As a result, professional translations have progressively become a commodity which, like petrol, flour, or sugar, are being purchased (almost) solely based on “lower price”, with negative consequences:
– The role of the professional translator will disappear: as the translation agency drops the rates, translation will be relegated to “moonlighters” or “beginners”, but it will no longer be sustainable as a full time job, or for periods of time that are long enough to grow professional skills in the field (10-30 years).
– A senior translator will be more and more expensive: since the demand for high-level translations will focus on a steady and progressive dwindling number of senior translators, they will have the power to increase exponentially their prices.
– An expert translator will be hard to find: not only because their number is going to decrease, but also because translation agencies will keep on improving their marketing strategies and it will be impossible to understand if quality really means expert translator.
Our translation agency is strictly committed to mitigate the risk that professional translations keep on going towards the “commoditization” (with all the negative consequences that we have just mentioned).
For this reason – instead of the traditional translation service prepacked to be sold with discounts, sales and self-referential quality assurances – we prefer to give to customers the chance to choose how much experience the want to buy: starting from their actual need (for example, basic understanding, literal translation, adapting a text to another culture, transcreation, etc.), they can decide on their own who has to translate their text, choosing a Student, a Junior, an Intermediate, a Senior, an Expert or a Copywriter translator according to their budget and the quality they look for.
Obviously, if you want you can let us choose the level of translation to buy: in this case, you just have to specify your goal and your budget and we will take care of everything.