The problem, however, which we have been noticing in our long experience, is to find service suppliers who are really experts in what they offer to do, and who can indeed work on behalf of the company. So it is with translators. There are quite a few companies offering that kind of service. Some are run by natives in the foreign language who, by circumstances, ended up in this business, but who have never worked in the corporate market and are not familiar with buzzwords. Others are gigantic, offer services in dozens of languages, have very impressive resources, but rely on third-parties (or, in this case, fourth-parties, as they are already the third-parties), who in turn cannot be adequately assessed.

We have recently received an email message with an advertisement from a very well structured company offering translation services in multiple languages. We could easily identify three Portuguese grammar mistakes in their opening address! When considering a translator, it is necessary to verify whether that person would be able to talk to your customers about your businesses. In reality, this is what the translator will be doing.

The outcome, almost always, is that the corporation that hired the translation work will have to assign an experienced employee to revise the job. Reviewing the text to apply minor adjustments is not a serious problem as there are some words which are familiar solely to those who work in a particular field of interest. But, in most cases, the text must be rewritten entirely as the language is inadequate to the subject, some expressions were translated when they should not have been, or, on the other hand, others were kept in the original while they should have been translated, and so on. If you are reading this document down to this point, you must be very familiar with that kind of problem.