Do you have to translate your business content into Spanish, but you’re not sure whether to choose a freelance professional or a translation agency? In this post, you can find some pros and cons of working with a freelance translator that will hopefully make your decision easier.
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Content index
Direct contact and quick communication
When you hire a freelance professional, you handle all issues with the same person who works on your texts. This has the advantage that the communication is direct and you are able to make and reply quickly to any question or comment that may appear before, during, and after the translation process.
On the other hand, when working with an agency, you handle any inquiry with a Project Manager who acts as a middleman between you and the translator. This slows down communication and can even cause misunderstandings. In addition, as PMs normally manage several projects at the same time, they may make decisions instead of asking. However, only some PMs are or have been translators, so even if it can save time sometimes, it can also affect the final quality.
Personal commitment and engagement
If you entrust the translation of all your content to a freelance translator, you can build a reliable partnership. This long-term collaboration ensures the highest quality, as there is a personal commitment to your business.
The freelance professional will know your company, products, needs, preferences and brand values better than an agency employer or an outsourced professional. So, the work will be done with more engagement and dedication to your success. You can have a strong relationship with a PM, but your content will be translated by someone you don’t know: usually, various translators with different backgrounds.
Homogeneous style throughout the content
Branding is highly relevant for positioning and differentiating your business, and it involves certain values, tone and style in your texts. When working with a freelance translator, their personal preferences and style (wording, sentence structure, tone, etc.) will naturally align with your requirements, keeping a homogenous style throughout your entire documentation.
If you work with an agency, the translations you request will probably be assigned to different professionals (sometimes even using different language variations). This fact makes it almost impossible to recognise the brand tone, even if you compile a detailed style guide.
Specific and accurate terminology
Working with a freelance professional for all your content ensures the use of accurate terminology without the need to compile glossaries or terminology lists on your own. A freelance translator will compile them and apply your specific terminology across all your business documentation.
Some translation agencies don’t even filter the translators by specialisation when assigning the projects. This is especially important, for example, for technical manuals or financial reports, where mistranslating a relevant term can change the meaning and have adverse consequences.
Consistency among contents
The mentioned aspects also allow keeping consistency in your content when hiring a freelance translator, since only one person works with your texts. This consistency gives your audience trust.
Even if the quality you obtain when hiring an agency may be sufficient for your needs (I also work for agencies and provide high-quality translations), your texts will lack consistency among different translation requests because they’ll most probably be assigned to multiple professionals. Inconsistencies appear when the personal preferences of different translators are combined in the same project and affect the quality of the text (for example, some translators working from English to Spanish would prefer to leave “online” and “e-mail”, and others would use “en línea” and “correo electrónico” instead).
Passion and specialisation on specific fields
As professional freelance translators, we expend lots of time and effort in training and improving our processes. The work is often our passion, and therefore it’s worth the endeavour to engage in a self-employment business. Specialisation is key to providing the best results and running a successful business, so we focus on specific fields. Thus, building a strong collaboration with a reliable, efficient, and flexible partner.
Agencies select their outsourced translators through a hard price competition, where deadlines are generally tight and quality is not always a relevant factor. Therefore, in many cases, the translators have little experience and/or no specialisation.
Maximisation of the allocated budget
When you hire a translation agency, your quotation will include overhead costs that you can avoid by working with a freelance professional. Apart from the agency fee, the costs of maintaining such infrastructure (staff, offices, etc.) are huge compared with the low fixed expenses of a freelance translator working from home.
Furthermore, if you hire the freelance translator directly, you maximise your budget by getting premium specialised services from a selected professional who matches your business and needs. Transparency and confidentiality are easily maintained since there are no extra intermediaries between you and the translator. Keep in mind that some agencies may even outsource to other agencies, so your documentation can pass through many hands.
Some disadvantages of working with a freelance professional
Of course, working with a freelance translator also has some cons.
Huge volumes
When you need to translate huge content volumes in a short period, a translation agency will allocate this volume to different translators to make it possible. If you work with a freelance professional, you’ll have to consider the volume capacity that can be assumed (which varies among professionals), check for availability, and schedule the content creation and translation accordingly.
Several languages
If your documentation needs to be translated into multiple languages, an agency can select translators with different working languages. However, most freelance translators can recommend trustworthy colleagues for other language pairs, so that you can have a team of freelancers translating your content into the needed languages. I can also manage multilingual translation projects to save you the time for building and coordinating the team.
Range of services
Sometimes there is a need for various linguistic services, and most agencies have a broader service portfolio than freelance professionals. On the other hand, many freelance translators provide services beyond translation, such as proofreading, localisation, transcreation, or SEO. You can ask for the services you need since freelancers are often flexible and multitalented. A good professional would only commit to providing a specific service with the security of being able to deliver a high quality.
Quality controls
Quality controls should always be part of the translation process. In the case of agencies, many of them have workflows where other professionals, apart from the translator, carry out the review and QA processes. This has some advantages, but also the disadvantage that, if the reviewer has little experience or is not specialised in that specific field, errors can be introduced. Professional freelance translators always review the text before delivery. In my case, when the project allows it, we review it by two people to avoid overlooking our own errors, and I also implement QA processes with specific tools.
The choice may not be that easy since it depends on your particular needs. At least, it’s clear that both of them are better than working with amateurs, or trusting automatic translation tools or AI, right?
How was your experience working with freelance translators or agencies for your translations? See you in the comments area!
If, after considering all these factors, you would like to work with a freelance professional for translating your business content from English and/or German into Spanish in the fields of technology, marketing, economics or sustainability, contact me. I’ll be glad to help you, and your texts will be clear, natural and adapted to the Spanish audience.
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Technical Translator specialised in Marketing, Economics and Environment. I hold an MSc. in Environmental Engineering and enjoy contributing to the expansion of sustainable businesses in the Spanish market with accurate translations, and clear and natural texts.
