So should you outsource or should you do it in-house?

That depends. Doing it in-house can often mean faster turnaround and more control. If most of the foreign language typesetting work comes in a certain language, there might be very good benefits doing it in-house. It requires some investment in software purchase and personnel hiring and training. You can develop both the translation and the typesetting team or you may decide to only do the typesetting part in house.

If you only receive foreign language requests once in a while, or if the requests are spread across many different languages, you may want to consider outsourcing. It enables you to develop a very scalable operation without major initial investment.

When you outsource, there may be some hidden benefits. For example, we discovered that for longer documents in QuarkXpress or InDesign, using a Trados Storycollector plug-in can collect all the text and put it into a translator friendly format. Not only does the translator perform the translation faster and more consistently, the translated file is easily importable to the original files with very minor adjustments needed. You can save an average of 50% typesetting time for a long document. In addition, if there is a lot of repetition in the document, you may enjoy additional savings (up to 40%). Knowledge like that takes time to accumulate and an experienced vendor would be able to advise you of such cost saving opportunities.

Let’s do it!

In today’s ever changing business environment, being adaptive to client requirements differentiates you from your competitors. When your clients are going global, shouldn’t they expect you to keep up?

Wintranslation.com is a professional translation service with offices in Windsor and Ottawa, Canada. It specializes in technical translation and foreign language typesetting.

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