The Major Challenges of Translation

Globalization is changing how people do business, with hundreds of companies taking their products and services to international shores every day. Expanding the global community means mixing languages and cultures, and the translation industry is growing at an exciting rate. However, growth doesn’t come from comfort, and many language service providers face new problems as their translation businesses grow.

What are the most common challenges of translation?

Language isn’t an exact science, and there are many major barriers to translation. So, what are the two challenges that make translation most difficult? Marrying accuracy with timing and finding the best way to manage the translation process. These challenges can be broken down even further to encompass ten major pain points:

What are the 10 problems in translation?

1. Measuring translation accuracy and quality
2. Translating content in a limited time
3. Keeping track of multiple translation projects
4. Translations for humor, sarcasm, and figures of speech
5. Finding translators with technical knowledge of a given subject
6. Finding providers you can trust with confidential information
7. Negotiating fair prices for translations
8. Translating words and phrases with multiple meanings
9. Duplicating translations of common words and phrases
10. Managing words and phrases that don’t have exact translations

Here we break down the top three translation challenges businesses face and how to overcome them.

1. Ensuring Translation Quality

Quality and accuracy are some of the biggest challenges in machine translation and the industry as a whole. How do you ensure your clients get high-quality multilingual content if you’re not fluent in every language? Thankfully, you can use technology to manage translation quality for your business. This often means using translation memory (TM) to store your previous translations so you can build them into your next translation job as you come across previously translated words.

Using software that auto-populates previously translated content into new jobs can reduce the time your team spends on each job, boosting productivity. It also allows you to charge your clients more accurately, not charging them for repeated content.

2. Delivering Translation on Time

Agreeing on timeframes for translation jobs and delivering completed work on time can cause headaches in the translation industry. Before promising supersonic turnaround times, remember that good translation takes time and re-doing badly translated work slows you down.

You can overcome this challenge by offering a per-hour pricing model instead of charging per word. This puts all the pressure on the translation supplier to provide sparkling, word-perfect multilingual content to the client in the agreed time frame – if not earlier.

Imagine if bricklayers started charging you by the brick rather than the time it

takes to build a wall. Crazy. Build the wall badly, and you’ll demand that he do it again. It’s the finished product that counts; if it’s completed quickly and is of superior quality, everyone wins.

Lastly, you can speed up translation time by leveraging machine learning. AI-powered software automates manual tasks and helps human translators work faster and smarter.

3. Managing Translation and Streamlining Workflows

Translation can get tricky when running multiple projects in different languages and working with numerous vendors. Coordinating with translators, building clear communication channels, and finding workflows that work for everyone can make translation difficult, especially for remote teams.

You can overcome these challenges in translation by finding vendors that use technology to streamline their internal processes and work more efficiently. That might mean building translator platforms so human translators can work on more than one project simultaneously or using AI-powered systems that allow translators to work faster. You can also use glossaries and flag words that shouldn’t be translated to help translators keep your company’s tone of voice spot-on.

Translations are a simple, cost-effective way to reach more customers and increase sales. Perhaps just as importantly, using the local language will reassure your customers that you have taken the time and trouble to research and commit to new markets.

Want to find out how you can negotiate the problems and challenges of translation for your business? Find out what Straker can do for you here.