What you should know before asking for a website translation estimate
By Felicia BRATU
Let’s say you’ve decided to expand your business to foreign markets and you are going to translate your website. There are a few things that you'll have to consider for a proper estimate on cost and turnaround.
Make sure you can provide the source files:
- Do not copy the content of your website in Word. Even if your website is very small and only has html pages, no fancy scripts, or database, this won’t help you get a correct estimate. By using this method, you might be missing some of the important parts of a webpage like: page title, keywords, page description, alt tags, text from images, etc.
- Do not give only the website address and expect to get the real cost. Many people in the translation industry can download some static websites, but by using this method, they might be missing some of the pages or they may download pages that you don’t want or don’t need translated.
- The graphics, PDFs or executable Flash files from your website can also be downloaded. However, this will only give the translator an idea about the website complexity and won’t be very helpful for a proper quotation.
Some of the images might need to be recreated – without the source files this will be a very difficult, time consuming task, and it is not very accurate. Here are some examples:
- A very simple navigation button (if there are still people that don't use CSS!): this can be recreated in Photoshop by deleting the English text and replacing it with the target language translation.
This might work very well if the target language doesn't require the same font to be used. For Chinese it works; for Spanish the localizer will have to try to match the font. What font is that? Hard to say without the source file!
- Another navigation button which is a little bit different; maybe not a very good artwork creation, but this is only an example: an image like this one will be impossible to reproduce without the source file. Some adjustments can be done, but the work involved and the final quality won’t compare with the source file.
- If you have PDF files on your website, we will need the source files used to create those PDFs. MS Word, QuarkXpress, Indesign, Framemaker, etc. By having the source file we will also be able to do an accurate word count.
- Flash files – without the source files the entire localization process may be compromised.
Make sure your English design allows localization:
For some languages, the text will be longer, so you'll have to make sure that the website design allows text expansion. If the website is already up and changes can’t be made, than you might expect some small adjustments.
Example: if you have this “Go” button or something similar and you translate your website into let's say, French, you’ll see that the French word for "Go" is longer. The button won't look the same at all. So you might want to change it with something else. An arrow will work very well.
These are very small issues, but each one of them can have a costly influence on your budget. |
