Building Client
Relationships In The Translation
Industry
In
translation, as indeed in any business, the obvious and only
key to retaining your clients is to provide them with
high-quality products and services, but this is far more
complicated than it sounds. You will first need to have a very
clear picture of exactly what determines the quality of
translation services, and then map the procedures you need to
safeguard the quality thus defined. These two steps are the
subject of a different publication by the same author (‘Quality
Assurance in the Translation Business’). In the present
article, we will discover that the fundamental quality factor
for customer retention in the translation business is long-term
consistency in translation choices.
In a commercial context,
there are essentially three factors that determine the
quality of a translation. First, the translation must be
available within the deadline by which the client needs its.
Second, the translation must reflect the client's
professionalism. This means it must be completely authentic,
written in a suitable style and register and entirely free
from language errors. Third, the text must be suitable for
the client’s needs. Generally speaking, this means your
translation must serve to promote the client’s market
reputation, help him attract business and be oriented
towards his envisaged readership, by which we mean that the
audience should be able to understand the text and to relate
it to other, previous texts as part of the client’s uniform
communication approach.
One aspect that sets translation services apart from many other
lines of business is that every next order for the same client
is a sequel to the previous one. What your client buys from you
is not so much a series of individual products, but sections of
a single, huge product – a convincing and coherent expression
of himself in a different language – that is built up in the
course of time. So to retain a new client for your company, the
second time he places a translation order you will have to
incorporate the first translation into your procedures for
processing the second. In the third order you will have to
integrate both the first and the second, etcetera. This is
because more than anything else, professional clients value and
indeed demand consistency in style and terminology. If this
sounds rather abstract, the following example will illustrate
our point. If, in a translation for a tax consultancy, you use
the term 'Tax Office' in one translation and ‘National Revenue’
in the next – for example because you needed two different
translators for the two orders – your client and his audience
will be confused and will rate your performance on the second
order lower than on the first, which may well be a reason for
them to look for a different agency with a better eye for
consistency – even though both Tax Office and National Revenue
are perfectly acceptable in English. Of course this need for
consistency and uniformity applies not only to individual words
or phrases, but to your client’s overall multilingual
communication strategy. This goes to show that to build up a
long-term relationship with a particular client it is essential
from a quality perspective to realise that you are not
providing a series of separate products, but a single
cumulative product over time, and that for each new order you
will have to draw upon the entire body of knowledge – the
corpus if you like – amassed in all your previous translations
for that client.
There are various tools available that will help you achieve
this degree of consistency. The most important of these is
modern translation software. By this we do not mean translation
programs – which are entirely worthless – but tools that help
translators identify similarities between different source
texts over time and supply existing translations from a
translation memory. These tools work on the level of both
separate terms and longer text passages or indeed entire
document files. Another great thing about this software is that
it recognises identical or similar sections in source texts
even if the client himself is not aware of any similarities.
For any self-respecting translator or translation agency,
working without this type of translation software has become
almost inconceivable.
Another quite useful, supplementary tool is the use of shared
online terminology databases such as those based on the
framework offered by Google on Google Documents &
Spreadsheets. This extremely user-friendly facility enables you
to build up wordlists for individual clients that grow
‘organically’ through contributions from multiple translators,
revisers and client staff. Aside from its huge practical
benefits, this technique also actively involves your client in
the translation process and enables you to benefit from his
expertise in the course of a project.
The use of multiple translators is unavoidable, especially in
the case of large clients, but it jeopardises your ability to
provide consistent translations. To overcome this problem,
flexible translation memories, organic online databases and
other instruments of this kind have become part and parcel of
modern-day translating and are essential for any translation
agency that aims to build long-term relationships with its
clients. Those clients expect your business to help them ensure
a uniform and recognisable approach in all of their
communications, and they will increasingly assess your
performance on consistency as a crucial prerequisite for
continued cooperation. Combined with the speed and pressure of
modern translation, this really makes it crucial for any
translation agency to abandon fragmented, manually created
personal wordlists and to merge its translation corpus in a
shared memory that automatically presents previous translation
choices and opens up the client archive for reference purposes
to benefit all parties involved – your business, your
translators and your client.
By: RosaB
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