Choosing the right translators for your project

Legal, medical, marketing, IT, patents, videogames, cooking, literature, nursery, financial… the variety of texts we can translate is what make our job so interesting. And also so challenging, as usually a translator cannot translate all types of text.

This is why translation agencies have procedures in place to choose the right translators in their team for any specicific project ensuring that the translator is qualified for that specific subject.

In this article we would like to share with you some details about our translator selection process, so that you get assured that your project will be in good hands. If you are a translator and would like to work with us, this will also help you to see if you meet our requirements.

When we receive a translator’s résumé, we check mainly four things:

• Translation training. We work with people who has a degree in translation or who has received sufficient translation training, as translation implies a series of skills that the mere fact of speaking a foreign language does not provide you with. We also have subject-matter experts, who may not have any linguistic training, but they are used for consulting and verification tasks.

• Translation tools. We think that translation tools are essential for working in our industry, especially for technical translation and software localization. There are many tools available in the market, and we understand that a freelance translator cannot make such a big investment, but mostly we can provide them with licenses to be used on certain projects. When we can see in our records that they are already familiar with several translation tools, we know that it will be easy for them to learn to use new tools.

• Language combinations. We get applications from many different language combinations, and all of them are stored for future use. However, we give priority to those language combinations that are more in demand by our clients.

• Specialty fields. As above mentioned, translators get specialized in certain fields; they build their own reference material and get training on these fields, so we only give them jobs that are related to their expertise. This does not mean that they will never have a chance to do something different; they can of course apply to do other types of texts, so that they can gain experience. When this happens, the job will be reviewed and edited by experienced translators in that field. We understand that in many cases you cannot disclose information about your clients, neither can we. This is why it is not so important for us to know your client, but we do need to know what type of translation you have done, i.e., no need to say that you worked translating user manuals for Samsung products, you can just say that you translated user manuals for consumer electronics products.

If after checking all this, we want to have this translator in our team, our Vendor Manager will send the translator one or more test translations (the translator can choose to apply for more than one field), and if the results are positive, the Vendor Manager will take the further steps to include this translator in our team.

From that moment on, the translator may start getting projects from us, if the availability, rates and specialty match our requirements for any specific project.

Having said this, we take the opportunity to let you know our latest needs. We are in need of medical translators for the English-Norwegian and English-Swedish language pairs, and Swedish-English translators, mostly for technical fields.

Would you like to join the Jensen Localization team? Contact us!