From business cards to brochures, flyers, and posters, it can be a daunting task to design print pieces that suit your business needs. Especially if you’re targeting a new international audience that speaks a completely different language.
Luckily, with professional DTP services by a reputable translation company, you can get your marketing material translated, localized, and adapted to meet your goals across target languages and locales.
In this article, we’ll share a few tips to help you find a professional translation company that meets your needs. Let’s dive in.
The 6 Key Traits of Reliable Professional DTP Services
Searching for the right translation company can be challenging. According to reputable sources such as CSA Research, the language services industry has surpassed 40 billion USD in value and is growing at a steady pace of over 5% per year.
The industry is flooded with a wide range of translation service providers. Some have been active for decades, and some are just a few years old. And the terminology and tone used when describing quality translation and DTP services are so homogenous that it can be hard to truly tell providers apart. And it can be even harder to distinguish mature and ethical companies from underperformers.
In this section, we’ll share the six traits you should look for in a potential language partner, and how to detect them as early as possible.
Your professional translation & DTP services provider should be:
- Efficient
- Culturally aware
- Multidisciplinary
- Transparent
- Reputable
- Accommodating
Download our Free DTP Guide
Get everything you need to know to hire world-class DTP services,
in a handy document.
Efficient
The key to getting the best out of your team of DTP specialists is to make sure that your translation company is properly equipped to handle your project. It’s about a combination of the right translation and DTP tools, the right people, and the right processes.
Multilingual DTP services will add some extra steps to your translation project, but depending on the complexity of your document, it may not add more than a couple of days to your timeline.
If you’re interested in how DTP can impact your translation project, both positively and negatively, check out our blog post on the Advantages and Disadvantages of Desktop Publishing.
Culturally Aware
Culturally sensitive translation is just as important as grammatically correct translation.
Cultural awareness in translation and professional DTP services is about understanding the source material’s original context and knowing how to adapt it so it can have the same impact within a new culture.
Your translation services and professional DTP services providers will probably request contextual information on your part in order to translate your words and adapt your document so it works for you.
Some may even say that a translation service is only as good as the information it is provided with. The more your translation team knows about the goals of your project, the better the output.
Your agency will need correct, complete, and contextual information on:
Your company’s products or services: The translator needs to know what your company’s services are in order to guarantee the use of the right terminology. If he or she is translating promotional material, he or she will need to understand the unique value of your services, so they can make sure they translate your pitch correctly.
Your home market: A translator who understands the culture of your home market will catch cultural references, jokes, and other nuances and transform them into their target culture equivalent.
Your target market: You may think all you are having translated is words, but it’s really about concepts. The cultural nuances of your text run deeper than you may think, and a translator with insider knowledge into your target culture will detect potential misunderstandings and address them directly.
Your company’s goals: Understanding the goals of a particular asset or campaign can help your linguist finetune the final result so it has the impact you wish for.
Multidisciplinary
Professional DTP translation services are fundamentally multidisciplinary. DTP services move away from plain translation and involve graphic design, the adaptation of visual content, and more.
A translation company that can offer DTP services, and is up to the challenge, will be multidisciplinary at heart.
Sign up to our newsletter to receive the latest blogs and news.
Transparent
In this section, we’ll refer to transparent pricing in particular. But your translation company should be transparent across the board.
For instance, if the documents they’ll be handling are sensitive in nature, they should be able to provide you with written agreements around the security and confidentiality of your material.
In the case of DTP translation rates, on the other hand, your translation company of choice should provide you with a predictable pricing structure and help you foresee any potential extra charges.
Best-in-class DTP professional services implement translation and publishing tools that automate repetitive tasks, track billable hours, and help them recognize trends in their workflow. These tools not only make for a consistent and data-driven pricing system but also trim non-essential costs.
Reputable
A translation company works as an intermediary between the client and the translators. Competitive translation companies provide linguists with the infrastructure, processes, and overhead necessary to produce high quality documents, so it’s the company’s responsibility to guarantee the quality of the translation and the team’s professional abilities.
There are a few simple things that one can do to verify a translation company’s reliability.
A reputable translation company will have a significant number of extremely satisfied clients that will praise and recommend the company. It is always a good idea to look for testimonials on the company’s website, as well as on industry platforms.
A translation company with years of experience is usually more reliable than a young company because it has a track record of quality and predictability. On the other hand, a seasoned agency probably has three key traits that will make your project easier:
- Tried-and-tested processes and a team that’s used to implementing them.
- An extensive glossary and a rich database of references that serve as shortcuts
- during the initial stages of the translation process.
- A wide network of talent.
Accommodating
It may come as a surprise, but the process of communicating with a professional DTP services provider is very similar to the process of working with a medical doctor to determine a diagnosis for symptoms and come up with the appropriate course of treatment.
A project manager (PM) at your translation agency of choice should engage you on a strategic level, asking about your project’s goals, the resources you can allocate to it, and the tools you have at your disposal to facilitate it.
Depending on the types of documents you need translated, translation and multilingual desktop publishing projects can take from days to weeks, to months.
During the process, you’ll want to be constantly updated by your Project Manager, and the company could even ask for extra contextual information and resources.
20 Questions to Ask a Potential Professional DTP Provider
While you can expect your professional DTP services provider to reach out through proactive project managers, you can take the initiative early in the business relationship, and ask the representative your own questions.
In fact, you can expect project managers to be open to answering any inquiries. Especially those related to the workflow they’ll implement during the project. Next, we’ll share 20 questions you could ask your potential DTP company, to make sure they meet the mark.
These questions are purely illustrative (and some of them could come across as a little blunt), so feel free to merely use them as a checklist to make sure you cover all important bases.
Timeline & Management
- How long should I expect my project to take?
- Can you accommodate short turnaround time?
- What could go wrong and delay the project?
- How can I help you prevent it?
- Do you automate repetitive tasks?
Cultural Awareness
- Will my project be in the hands of native language professionals?
- When you look at the source material, are there any pieces missing?
- Do you need some extra context?
Desktop Publishing
- Do you have an in-house desktop publishing team?
- What resources should I provide to the DTP team, to make their life easier?
- What file format do you support and what format will the final deliverables be in?
- How do you ensure high quality DTP?
Pricing & Transparency
- How do you determine your pricing?
- Can I get an estimate for my DTP translation project?
- How do you protect my document’s privacy?
- Are you GDPR compliant?
Experience & Reputation
- Have you worked with companies in my industry before?
- Do you have the resources and industry expertise to get this done?
Accommodating
- How will we communicate during the project?
- Do you offer around-the-clock support?
- How often should I expect updates?
Work with a Leading Professional DTP Company
bayantech is the leading translation company in the MENA region. With expertise in Arabic desktop publishing and beyond, we’ve carried out hundreds of thousands of projects, for the most rigorous companies, across all latitudes.
As an ISO-certified translation, localization, and DTP services provider, we ensure the highest level of cross-cultural expertise powered by a solid toolkit that reduces costs and guarantees efficiency. Reduce the production cost of your international marketing assets, communicate at scale, and grow consistently with a reliable language partner.
