Understanding Your Finances

No business can do anything without finances. Do budget properly, and do the math to understand your bottom line. How much do you need to make to turn a profit? How much is too much for customers to afford?

Knowing when and where to cut back on your finances and where to invest is critical to keeping your business afloat. With the huge impact of the pandemic, it’s no question that the loss of sales affected many businesses too much. To weather these hardships, downsizing on your output, office space, or perhaps even prices might help you keep the business going.

Making and Keeping Connections, even Remotely

Many language service providers rely on freelance translators and interpreters as vendors for their business; most times, getting in touch with them is often done through phone calls or emails. But, how do you get the vendor—especially interpreters—to their assignments, when in-person meetings are restricted?

Phone and video methods are hardly secrets. Even outside of the pandemic, these are common ways to get an interpreter to someone immediately regardless of where the client and interpreter are. Those LSPs and other small businesses that had already been getting ready to use remote or online options were in a good place to adapt their services to the pandemic.

Communicating with Your Team

To keep open communication with your team members is vital. Just as upper management relies on associates to get the on-hands work done, associates rely on upper management to answer their questions. The back-and-forth dynamics and momentum are crucial to move your business forward.

In times of hardship like the pandemic, transparent communication is very important. Employees may be nervous about job security or keeping certain accounts going. Positive reinforcement, support, and leadership can provide teams with the confidence they need to weather any circumstance.

Don’t be Afraid of Change…

New technologies come out constantly in today’s world, even during the pandemic and afterward. Learning how to use them can help your business stay up-to-date, and can even help with your output’s quality and/or quantity.

Other changes might include the coming and going of staff, a vendor changing their prices, the laws you have to keep in mind, etc. Keep abreast of these changes and remember to stay flexible; taking too long to adapt might leave you in the dust of your competitors.

Adapting to pandemic looked different for all sorts of companies, but what’s important is to stay creative. Some businesses turned remote, others decided to automate work flows, and some decided to host online events.

…But Try to Stay Consistent

Sudden, unexplained changes even outside the pandemic can upset a person’s balance and leave them scrambling for an answer. For example, having to reduce the price per word for a translation could result in a vendor refusing to work with you, or raising the prices too high for a customer could result in the customer backing out of a deal.

As important as it is to stay flexible, people like to stick to tried and true methods—things remain reliable that way. So, whenever possible, keep consistent in your work, and be as transparent as possible with your customers. Consistency and transparency will always be appreciated by those you work with.

As a language service provider, one part of our job is to observe trends. These trends may be used to confirm jobs with specific clients or keep track of certain trends in language, and can be very important to our work. Put simply, collecting data on trends can help LSPs understand how to improve upon themselves.

In today’s blog, we’ll be highlighting a few tips about how to track trends by collecting data and use it to your LSP’s advantage.

Try out surveys.

Surveys are a very easy way to get qualitative data, which can help LSPs understand the quality of the service they provided. Usually, surveys are sent out to clients after they’ve received their service. Clients can rate their satisfaction with the service they received on a scale such as from 1-10 or Poor to Excellent, and can leave more detailed information about what they liked and did not like about their service.

Challenges may occur if a client forgets to fill out some of the questions, misunderstands a question, or doesn’t fill out the survey at all. Make sure to make the survey as clear as possible, and, whenever possible, provide the client’s preferred language.

Use transactional data.

You can collect data from your own company’s transactional data to collect quantitative data, which can help LSPs identify how many times they provided service for different languages and for which clients. Transactional data refers to your sales, receipts, POs, invoices, etc. that tell you when, where, how, and for what language you’re providing services for.

For example, a common language to interpret for in America is Spanish. By looking at your transactional data, you can identify trends. For example, if there are more requests from a nearby hospital, you can deduce if you need to hire more medical interpreters. Similarly, you can look at trends in language requests, such as if there’s a sudden surge in Korean requests; perhaps there has been an influx of people moving to the area, or there’s some sort of event going on that you should investigate.

Interviews.

When working with a contracted partner, you might want to take the opportunity to interview them and ask their opinion on your services. You can also ask if their clients mentioned anything to them about your translator or interpreter. For example, talking with a contracted health care provider can glean information from their management department as well as their patients about your interpreter’s bedside manner and professionalism.

Keep up-to-date and do research.

Other important topics to keep an eye on in the language services industry are things like technology and common issues. Technology is essential in today’s world, especially for large translation projects or simultaneous interpretation assignments.

Technology and common issues or topics of conversation constantly change and evolve. If we don’t pay attention, it can be easy to lose track of these ideas and fall behind competitors or not be able to provide the best service. Make sure to keep up-to-date, and research through news articles and even social media such as LinkedIn to see what people are talking about.

All in all, it’s good to remember that improvement is something we should always strive for. The quality of our services as LSPs is something we should make sure to provide, and collecting and analyzing data is a great step forward.

One way is automating it. Some of the simplest mistakes that translators make involve mixing up numbers, conversions, or names. The easiest way to make sure that you have correctly reflected every instance mentioned in the source in the translation is to use a text compare. Of course, your translation will be flagged as being vastly different from the source, but it will let you know if the numbers, company names, and other words or numbers that have to be the same in the target as they are in the source are the same or not. It also takes virtually no time too. All you have to do is copy and paste then press a button. It shouldn’t take you more than five minutes to go through everything depending on the length of your project.

Another way is to make it hard to make any mistakes from the very start. If you are translating into a new, blank document, instead try translating into the target document itself. You could even enter the strings into a machine translation so that you can see the translation and the source side by side. Doing this makes it much harder for you to make any typing errors when copying whatever needs to be the same in the target as in the source. If the document you have is not easily copied such as a pdf, you can use OCR to help make the text selectable and then copy it into a word document.

The next tip is the simplest and possibly the most obvious solution. Whenever you see something that has to stay the same between the source and target, just copy it from the source to the target. So for example, if you have a number like 1,000,231, then just copy it into the target. If you want to take this a step further, then you should highlight every instance of numbers or text that need to be the same between the two files and then you will be able to quickly identify the places that need to be checked before delivery.

Quality Assurance is a necessary part of the translation process but often not something that is effectively done due to time constraints or other factors. Hopefully with this post, you have learned a few tips about how you can make the process shorter, but without sacrificing any quality. If you are able to submit a translation that avoids minor mistakes can really help your reputation and make you stand out as a translator who can be relied on.

Technology helps us make even more human connections. Thanks to the Internet and certain tools that have been developed, we can communicate with people across the world, which is helpful in locating and working with highly qualified translators and interpreters in any number of specialized domains (such as medical, educational, legal, or IT), within any timeframe, or any sizes of projects.

Technology also makes it easy for translation clients, project managers, translators, and interpreters to work together as a team. This type of expanding cooperation is a huge help for people in all sorts of limited English proficiency (LEP) communities. It is necessary to build a just and fair society, and we are happy to be able to use technology to further this goal.

In our day-to-day activities, technology plays a major role. Most of our translation and interpretation requests come in electronically, which ensures that everyone is on the same page. We are also better able to fill last-minute requests; most translators and interpreters have access to their apps, text messages and email at all times, and so we can reach them to discuss last-minute projects and especially emergencies. In all of these scenarios, technology helps us expand our reach and make more human connections than would otherwise be possible.

We are greatly appreciative of all of the benefits that technology allows us in our work. However, there are some aspects of the job and the industry that technology cannot replace. Technology has limitations.  Our main focus is helping people and the last thing we want to do is use technology as a substitute for human interaction. This is why we try to make it clear that although we are using many different technologies in our work, there is always a person behind the screen working hard to connect with people and serve our clients. In hospital settings and in most cases, having live interpreters serving clients face to face is even more valuable and worthwhile than over video or phone.

People are still at the heart of the translation and interpretation industry. After all, these services wouldn’t exist if there were no people to read or listen to the translated product! So while certain aspects of this work don’t take place face to face, the importance of people and human input is as high as ever. At Monterey Language Services, we use technology to facilitate communication with our team members and with our clients, who are always our main focus.