Often nonprofit leaders or business owners in need of translation services find themselves caught between two unacceptable extremes:
- Limit their translation to what they can afford to outsource to professional translators. This means they might only be able to offer a small amount of material in other languages.
- Use untrained volunteers or staff who fall into the trap of using Google Translate as a shortcut. This means more translation can be produced, but the quality is questionable. In many cases, this negatively affects the reputation of the organization.
What if I told you there was another option… a happy medium between high-priced translation and low quality translation?
A few years ago, we only had a handful of French materials for our nonprofit… now we have translated over 5 million words. At the average rate in Quebec for certified translators, that would have cost over $1 million. We only spent a fraction of that … what was our secret?
The key was training an in-house team (in our case, mostly volunteers already connected with our nonprofit) rather than paying certified translators.
Why in-house? We discovered that people who already understood our mission and values were the BEST people to translate our materials authentically. We leveraged their bilingual skills, used an editing system that capitalized on each person’s strongest language, and developed an accelerated training method to achieve high-quality results.
This alternative approach is perfectly suited to nonprofits and small to medium-sized businesses. You can make more materials available in other languages without sacrificing quality and without spending a fortune. The system we developed works in any language. Check out our training options at: LearnTranslation.com
Have a great day!
Liane 🙂
www.LearnTranslation.com
www.NonprofitTranslation.org
