Your Clients are Going Global - Can You Keep Up?

As more companies conduct business globally, their printing needs often involve more foreign language translation and typesetting. Being able to meet such growing needs may give your business a major competitive advantage. So, have you considered adding translation and typesetting to your printing offerings? The one-stop convenience may be a major draw for businesses that have frequent dealings overseas. They will most likely choose a printer that can handle everything rather than dividing the work up for several printers to handle.

So what do you need to do to get started?

When a client calls up and asks to have their existing English brochure printed in Chinese, you have several tasks in hand. You need to have the brochure translated, typeset and printed. Since printing is your core competency, we will only talk about the first two – translation and typesetting.

Taking care of Translation

Let’s first take care of the translation. You have the choice of using a freelance translator or a translation company.

You need more than a native speaker

Your translator should be a native speaker of the language that he translates into and he should also have sufficient professional translation experience. However, keep in mind that not all native speakers can be translators. Why? Just think of copy writing. Would you use an engineer to write your copy just because the engineer is a native speaker? No, copywriting and engineering are two different disciplines and require very distinctive skills. The same idea applies to good translators who are more than just native speakers of the language.

When material is technical

If the material is of technical or specialized nature, you might want to select someone who has had professional training and experience in that field. If the document is a Material Safety Datasheet (MSDS) on industrial gases, you may need someone who has a degree in chemical engineering to do a good job.

Team up a translator and an editor for high quality translations

Unless the document is for information use only, you will want to have a team of two translators on board, one for translating, and one for editing and proofreading. Having a fresh pair of eyes and a second opinion are very beneficial to high quality translations.

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