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by Scott Urista
Should your company outsource translation responsibilities? Should you hire someone on a full-time basis to handle translation tasks? The answer largely depends on the amount of work and the amount of specialized knowledge required.
If you only occasionally need general documents (e.g., internal memos) translated, often the best solution is to hire a permanent internal liaison. This role tends to be low paying, and is normally filled by people with acceptable language skills but relatively little actual business experience.
However, the importance of creating a detailed job description for any liaison role can hardly be stressed enough. A job description is important for any position, but particularly so for liaison roles, which tend to be fairly 'fuzzy' in terms of responsibility and flow (since work is often spread across departments or branches).
When hiring a liaison role, ensure that a clear chain of command is in place. Ensure only one person is in charge of giving the liaison work. You want to avoid situations where the liaison is getting work from multiple sources, is not in a position to turn away work, and is not able to clarify priority.
I have seen far too many situations where a company decides that having a bilingual, quick-thinking person on board will be 'useful'. But without a clear chain of command, and a clear job description, only one of two things can occur. The more likely scenario is that the liaison will have no work to do. Because it is unclear what the person should be doing, or who should be telling her what to do, the liaison ends up doing nothing. Particularly at a Japanese firm, it is fairly hard to go about creating your own role (which actually shouldn't be the person's responsibility in the first place, but rather that of his superior). So the liaison sits there, frustrated because she doesnft know what to do. She regrets that her skills are being wasted or underutilized, and that she isnft getting the training she expected.
Other people in the department will also be frustrated and jealous of the liaison, who 'gets paid to look out the window'. The company decides after a time that the liaison is lazy and isn't really doing anything, and either fires him or assigns him menial tasks. The combination of frustration with the position and alienation from co-workers means the liaison quits after just a few months.
At the other end of the spectrum is the case where other departments hear about the 'useful' bilingual person and start sending work to her directly. Without a clear chain of command to clarify what work should be taken on and in what order, the liaison is unsure of who she should or shouldn't be accepting work from and so takes everything on. The result is a very frustrated, overworked liaison who quits after a few months because of a lack of structure to the position.
As mentioned above, the liaison position is often filled with people having good language skills but relatively limited business experience. As such, liaison work should normally be limited to internal interfacing. (Interfacing with external clients is a vital business function and should only be handled by experienced members of the firm.) Translation work should thus be limited to internal memos, emails, and so forth, and the liaison should have the freedom to query the author as needed. This is true for most roles, but speaking particularly about translation, the steepness of the learning curve is inversely proportional to the amount of feedback given.
If you have no real need for an internal liaison, you should seek an external solution. However, the time and effort involved in finding and testing a freelance translator may far exceed the amount of work involved. In this case, you should probably go through a translation agency. A good translation agency has already done the translator screening part and will often do a preliminary check and edit of the translation before sending it back to you. Costs are sometimes higher than using a translator directly. But if you have few translation jobs, the higher cost is easily justified by the time saved by not having to track down a translator every time you need one.
For specialized work, going through an agency is still an option. However, you may find that in the long run you are better off finding and working with a freelance translator. Agencies are often more expensive than freelancers, and additionally will often raise the price for specialized work. Investing time and effort in finding a good freelancer, and giving them feedback, is worthwhile.
If you have sufficient translation volume for a full-time position, there isn't much doubt: hire a full-time translator. If content is largely specialized with some general stuff, hire a specialist translator and outsource the general work. Nothing discourages a translator with specialized knowledge and experience faster than having him translate memos on when and where the next department meeting will take place. If the content is largely general but slightly specialized, hire a less experienced translator—but be willing and able to offer training—and outsource the specialized work.
The perceived cost benefits of hiring an in-house freelancer are not as great as is often thought. The more specialized the content, the higher the salary required to lure good translators. Salaries are (generally) comparable with what one would pay an experienced external translator, plus the other costs associated with any employee (e.g., insurance, equipment). However, an in-house translator is more involved with the product, and is (usually) more aware of what the end product needs to look like. This value-added aspect is often overlooked: if we look at the overall product, in general a good in-house translator is more efficient time-wise than even the best external translator. Given sufficient volume, the in-house translator route normally offers the best cost-performance solution.
In particular, in-house employees are available to work on other aspects of the product. Some translators greatly appreciate the opportunity to learn more about the end result and see how their translation is used, in turn helping them turn in a better product. Other translators are completely happy translating all day and may actually resent being 'forced' to do other jobs. Before hiring for an in-house position, think about what sort of position you are trying to fill, and make sure the person you hire suits that position.
Using freelance translators does have its merits, including being able to closely match costs to volume. Using freelancers often means the department headcount remains open for other positions.
However, there are clear negatives as well. The better freelance translators are often extremely busy and have multiple clients. This means that during busy times for your particular field, they will also be busy; your favorite translator may not be available when you need her the most. Or she will be available but unable to meet your deadline because of prior work commitments. You may have to boost the rate you pay to bump your work up on the priority list.
Because they have multiple clients, freelancers will often be unwilling or unable to take into account 'house styles'; an additional burden during the in-house check stage.
Freelancers tend to work with far less feedback than do in-house translators, and because they rarely—if ever—have contact with the author, freelancers will query and flag things that an in-house translator would know instinctively—also an additional burden on the checker.
It appears that simply being in the same environment as the author leads to an improvement in ability. In contrast, it is the rare freelancer who improves with time, simply because the level of feedback tends to be less than that received in an in-house situation. In all fairness, feedback is a two-way street; in many cases companies simply do not work hard enough at ensuring external (and internal) translators get sufficient, timely feedback. Still, it is one of the idiosyncrasies of the field that the fastest freelance translators will often be the worst at listening to feedback—having to think about 'house styles' and so on slows them down. You must decide whether the time gained by getting back a factually correct translation so fast offsets the time needed to edit for house style.
Actual translation speed tends to differ very little between freelancers and in-house translators. However, if we consider the time needed to confirm availability, send out and get back work, and check the translation, in-house translators are generally the faster option (although obviously the time lost by using a freelancer is inversely proportional to the size of the document).
On balance, the in-house translator is faster, more consistent, and will make fewer mistakes than the external freelancer (not because the in-house translator is necessarily better, but because he is working closer to the source). While one should not expect any significant cost savings (particularly for specialized content) on the translation alone, the in-house option is generally the more time-efficient option.
Scott Urista has over 10 years experience in financial translation, both as a freelancer and at in-house positions. He has spent the last several years managing research production departments for major investment banking firms in Tokyo, overseeing the translation, editing, DTP and distribution functions for dual-language research.