| About 99% of translation companies follow the same pattern. There are 1 to 4 people working in-house, usually project managers who coordinate the work of hundreds of freelance translators. Most project managers in the business will tell you that freelancers will sometimes have personal issues resulting in non-delivery or a late delivery.
| 1. Failure to deliver on time.
| With a full-time, in-house staff of over 40 people, we are able to ensure on-time delivery, and we are also able to handle delivery issues by deploying senior translators on a rapid response basis if part of a job needs to be fixed. In fact, despite working on thousands of jobs over the years, we have never, ever been late on delivery of a translation.
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| This problem is sometimes seen in low-cost translation agencies from such countries are China or India (the more expensive agencies from these countries are better, in most cases), as they will often use inexperienced translators, or translators who are neither native English nor native Japanese. Worldwide, you will sometimes encounter translation agencies that use machine translation and post-editing of the output–as you can imagine, this often results in mistranslations, unless the post-editor is a skilled and experienced linguist who carefully compares the output to the source text–alas, generally this is not the case.
| 2. Quality similar to machine translation
| We supply only human translation, but our work flow and systems make it possible for our native English and native Japanese translators to work at a speed equivalent to machine translation and post-editing (referring to the source text and rewriting the machine output). We believe that our human translators will generally make better terminological choices, and produce a more natural turn of phrase, as a post-editor will inevitably be influenced to some extent by the machine output.
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| In patent translation, and technical translation in general, it is important to use the same word consistently to refer to a particular object, action or phenomenon. In non-technical translation you can use a synonym, but in technical translation, and especially patents, a synonym may lead to confusion as to whether you are referring to a previous object, such objects in general, or another specific object, for example. If you place multiple translation orders with an agency, you have no guarantee that they will use the same translator, even if they say they will. This may result in inconsistency in terminology. Even ordering directly from freelancers may be doubtful, as they may or may not recall what word they used in your previous jobs.
| 3. Consistency of terminology and phrasing
| We use primarily in-house translators, with a small number of staff working full-time for us offsite. In order to accumulate, retain and deploy knowledge, skills and experience over the years, we have established systems to provide translators with glossaries and other reference material prior to the start of the translation process. This is our way of ensuring terminological consistency within and across projects.
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| Freelancers or agencies that are able to turn around projects cheaply or quickly often appear attractive in the beginning. However, after several quality issues and late deliveries arise, clients will eventually end up seeking a mid-price agency like Kakkazan.
| 4. Low cost or high speed, but poor quality
| Our quality assurance system is, in terms of HR cost, a significant expense. This is why no other translation company has such an extensive work flow in place. Using this system, providing high quality translations is possible, but it takes time and money for it to work properly. We may not be the cheapest or fastest translation provider around, but neither are we the most expensive or slowest. Given our quality assurance system and in-house translation team, we believe that you will understand that Kakkazan is your best choice for patent, technical and business translation.
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