Analysis of the Multilingual Document Translation
Abstract: this article, from the characteristics of multilingual document translation and the present situation of the translation industry, conduct a comprehensive analysis on how to prepare and which should be attached with great importance to the translation agencies and the individual translators.
As a Chinese old saying goes: Know the enemy and know yourself, and you can fight a hundred battles without defeat.. As I want to be a professional translator, I conduct some investigation on this industry. The data shows that the current market scale of the Chinese multilingual document translation industry surpasses billions of Yuan and the effective registration of domestic multilingual document translation companies have nearly amounted to 3000. However, the market share of these companies only accounts for 10%. The linguistic translation covers a wide range including English, Japanese, German, French, Korean, Russian, etc. The translation of technical documents is in a great demand, such as machinery, electronics, and auto. Besides, financial and legal documents are also very hot. The market of multilingual document translation has following characteristics:
1. The scale of those multilingual document translation companies is small. Actually, it has insufficient translation companies who can provide high-quality and professional services. The domestic market lacks professional education organizations and training institutions that specialize in cultivating qualified translators. Hence, the translation industry still hasn’t yet been formed in China.
2. The quantity of providing multilingual document translation services is huge. But actually, it is irregular. Due to the inadequate amount of full-time staffs, many companies have to rely on the part-time staffs or the outsourcing services. So, it is difficult to guarantee the translation quality.
The competition in the transition industry is extremely fierce, and the service price takes on continually declining tendency. Many multilingual document translation companies offer lower translation prices so as to allure more customers. For getting more profit, such companies don’t adopt editing and review process in their conventional translation services. Thus, the quality cannot be guaranteed but declined.
Obviously, the multilingual document translation in the domestic market is still far from norm. Facing such a huge market, translation companies must assure the quality up to the standardization, maintain a high-standard service, only by doing so can they be survived on the translation market. As a translator, the one also needs to learn and improve his/her quality in translation, needs to adapt to the higher and higher requests from professional perspective.
If a company wants to be the knock-out service provider, it must have more competitive products than other translation companies. Multilingual document translation refers to many aspects, so one must has its own strength. For this reason, I also have conducted many researches. The following is the analysis:
As for the size of the multilingual document translation, it usually has two categories: the significant translation project and the common translation project. The significant translation project refers to the translation of a single business charging the prices of more than 0.1 million Yuan; the main customs who commonly offer translation projects form the routine works to the translation companies and thus such companies , are obtained with relatively stable and long-term business According to the research, the income of significant projects approximately occupies 20% of company’s business while the common projects accounts for 80%.
From the ranking list of the multilingual document translation, I find that machinery, IT communications, auto, electronics, financial and legal documents account for a higher proportion while the number of other sectors is relatively dispersed. As to a single turnover of common translation projects, financial, legal and IT communications industries need to bear higher cost. Therefore, it can be concluded that the financial, legal and IT communications and chemical engineering are the domains frequently requiring higher daily translation but with relative lower management cost. Therefore, the translation agencies may increase the market development dynamics in these domains.
From the perspective of multilingual document translation, the diversity of languages is also very important. The languages frequently being translated cover English, Japanese, German, French, and the charges of these language translation projects usually lower than other small languages such as Arabic, Italian, Philippine and so on. However, English cost ought to be lower than the rest three languages in the above- mentioned four major languages.
Above is the general analysis on the multilingual document translation market. Either the translation companies or the individuals all wants to have a fixed market-share in the translation industry. As far as I am concerned, attitude is the most important ingredient towards the success. We should grantee the quality, figure out individual’s specific strengths and features, improve and strengthen them in an all round way.
Author Information:
Sana
Market Researcher of
Transhorsa Translation Co., LTD., Shanghai
http://www.transhorsa.org
Native translator & Proofreading
