In the translation industry, there’s a cut-throat competition among vendors. Price cuts are not always the first concern for certain clients before a pressing deadline.
What you need is a professional translation service provider that would listen attentively to your needs and think in your shoes.
You have received several proposals, which seemed to be ridiculously high or taking much time, or both.
None of the translation agencies can really understand your request.
Or they don’t bother: because helping you to cut down work scope would slack down their revenue and profits along the way, mainly when translation service works in a billing system that is measured by the number of words being translated.
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fast chinese translation services
The more you put in work scope, the more you pay for it, and the more they earn from it.
Simple as that.
This was what happened to one of our clients recently.
Our client, a medical device OEM manufacturer, approached us with an urgent task.
They received an updated version of some supplier agreements from one of their long-term customers.
Three documents included generic terms, non-disclosure terms, inventory rules, payment terms, the penalty for breaches and many other trivial, yet necessary changes than the previous version.
There were 32 pages in total, full of lengthy legal verses. According to MS Word, the total word count is over 12,000 source words.
Problem: How to translate 12,000 words in 24 hours?
The client needs to hold a teleconference with their customer regarding the term changes in 24 hours to discuss the changes.
The contents are full of complex syntax and sprinkled with legal terms. It would take any professional legal translator at least four working days to complete.
Some agencies would split the work between several translators to make it happen on time. It’s likely you will not get a consistent translation due to the absence of proofreading, given the short deadline.
However, you will be shocked at how much rush fees they are charging you: triple would be a nice bargain.
Although we do not charge any rush fee, the client doesn’t have the budget for that either.
In short, 24 hours is too short a time to translate all the contents.
It’s not a good idea to translate all the contents.
Solution: Gist translation, cut down the scope by translating only important pieces of information
Since they don’t have the time and budget to run full-length translation in Chinese, what we can do is to cut down the work scope by focusing on those pieces of information that are important to our client.
So, we suggested a gist translation, which means that our native Chinese legal translator will go through all the terms in all the agreement documents, then highlight every questionable term: harsh terms, or those prone to have potential losses or future disputes. Also, finally, translate only those terms that need the client’s attention in particular.
We made a quotation based on the estimated hours to complete the work, and it’s well within the client’s budget, so they move forward with the task.
Result: Fast turn-around time and happy client
In just 4 hours, our legal translator has gathered all pointers that could put our client at a vulnerable position, then she translated all the pointers with lots of side notes, from a professional point of view. The legal translator works at a law firm in Shanghai since 2008, with strong expertise on agreement translation and intellectual property law.
The client was delighted and thankful to receive our gist translation in such a short time frame, and they found her side notes and suggestions are very helpful in negotiating with their customer in their conference call.
They commented on our gist translation service as “… well worth it!”
Do you have similar projects? Let us know. If you need assistance in the intersection of the medical device, legal, and IP matters, we can help on Chinese legal documents or other agreements that require review and translation.
