Buying competitively. How do you choose a good translation supplier?
Of course, the first criterion is price. However, it is not the only factor. Some savings can turn out to be very costly, especially in the field of communication. Your brand image and the competitiveness of your products are at stake! Translated texts are, in fact, an integral part of the quality of the products themselves: cutting costs would be a major error, adding value is absolutely essential. Globalization and competition demand it.

The Three Ms and the Total Quality linguistic production process
If the company offering to supply your translations does not have the Three Ms at its disposal, you should rule it out.

Here's why:
 
Multinational
(translation carried out where the language is spoken, without interference)

High-quality language can only be produced where it is spoken. Therefore, you should only choose a supplier who genuinely has offices or real partners located in the countries where the language you want to translate into is spoken. Indeed, even "mother tongue" translators risk making serious lexical or morphosyntactic errors of interference if they live a long way from their country of origin. Moreover, languages are evolving much more than we think: thousands of new words are added to dictionaries every five to ten years, whilst others are removed. Not to mention geo-stylistic differences in linguistic terms...
If your suppliers only have a national office, they cannot really guarantee the linguistic and geo-marketing quality of the multilingual texts that you entrust to them. These so-called "multilingual" local offices should, in reality, limit themselves to translating into one or two languages at most (in the case of bilingual countries).

Multilingual
(linguistic engineering versus the obscure deception of "letterbox" agencies)

Increasingly, advertising and technical texts will need to be translated into several languages: in continental Europe alone there are more than two dozen. This is no mean feat. However, before you go any further, you should make sure you rule out the first major deception in this field. The vast majority of translation agencies (the ever-present "letterbox" agencies), tiny companies often with no in-house translators, impudently present themselves as eternally futuristic central offices in contact with "thousands of translators, each specialized in a particular technical field". Nothing could be further from the truth! Besides the fact that technologies, and therefore sector and business technolects, are increasingly diversifying and multiplying, the poor freelance translators that they use would very often find they had no work if they were to limit themselves to their so-called and increasingly impossible specializations... In reality, modern applied translation theory and linguistic engineering have solved the problem of the ever-increasing technicality of texts, thanks to the use of translation memory systems and terminotics.

It is therefore imperative to rule out these candidates and opt for more honest and professional suppliers.

Multimedia
(Total Quality checking, from the translation and layout to the final publication)

For the most part, translated texts are intended for publication (printed, recorded, burned onto CD, or localized on the Web), i.e., they are to be combined with images and sounds on various audiovisual supports. In addition, it is not unusual to have to modify the layout of a text, even in the final phase of the layout. It is therefore necessary to avoid all suppliers who are not in perfect command of the whole production, editing, and publishing process. If they do not have high-tech in-house publishing departments, graphic designers, Web publishers, and production managers, rule them out immediately. They quite simply will not have the means to guarantee quality control right up to the final moment of production. Total Quality is always dependent on in-house checks. Many checks.

It is therefore in your interests to sidestep "letterbox" suppliers.
Such offices do not, in fact, have in-house translators, or they are few in number compared with the number of languages they offer. It would be better, in this case, to contact the freelancers directly (they can easily be found in the phone book). These useless middlemen turn to freelancers to carry out translations that will cost you much more, with no added linguistic value.