When your company is doing business abroad or at an international level, you discover the problem of receiving information in a language that you do not understand. Most companies doing business abroad rely on translation services. If your budget is really low for translation, you may think of using cheap translation machine translation software like Google Translate or Bing Translate. Is that a wise decision?

Machine Translation like Google Translate or Bing Translator

Most of the times you will think of using this kind of services as free is better than cheap translation right? They are improving the quality and that is rapidly going. However most of the times it can be crucial to understand the meaning of a document when using Machine Translation. Also when you receive a hard copy there is not a solution to get the hard copy of the document into Google Translate or Bing translate. You find that you have to type the text and that is time consuming when you receive a document of 10 pages. Not the most ideal situation but the nice thing is that is does not cost a thing….

Traditional Translation Services

There are worldwide around 35000 translation agencies and some offer cheap translation for your documents. The price of the translation of a document will be done based on the information in the document. If it is high technical or medical for example the price per word will be or could be higher than a simple letter to translate. How does it work? You just simply send the document to the translation agency and they send you a price of the translation and a date and time that the document will be send to you by email translated and checked by their quality assurance team.

The prices vary from 0.10 usd per word till 0.22 usd per word. Just depends on the difficulty of the document and how fast you need it. If you urgently need to receive the translation or you might need to have it done in the weekend, extra surcharges will be added to the total price.

One page is around 350-500 words and a document of 10 pages can be very expensive…

Cheap translation: Get your document translated live!

Live Document Translation is a new service which fills the gap between machine translation and traditional translation services. With this new service, you just upload your document, set your questions and get a translator on the phone answering your questions live! Within half an hour you can get the meaning of your document known and even on the phone you can act by asking the translator to check specific for you important items in the document. And what does it cost? The price per minute of having a translator on the phone is 1.98 usd per minute. Now is that cheap translation or not?

After the live translation

When you discover that you need to have the document translated after you have the live translator on the phone, you will automatically will get a quote by email with a delivery time. The price will be 0.10 usd per word with no surcharges, no weekend charges or extra cost.  Now you can decide in advance if you really need to have written translation when you already know the content.

Think about how much money you could save in the company by analyzing if you really are in need of get expensive translation services.