0 Why most businesses need a translation agency, not a freelancer

There’s a fairly common belief among freelance translators that translation agencies are, at best, something you necessarily grow out of as your career develops and, at worst, a plague to the translation industry. The problem with this belief is that it assumes that all translation agencies are nothing more than paper-shufflers passing e-mails back and forth between translator and customer. Unfortunately, this is true for a great many translation agencies, but as not all freelancers are created equal, so, too, are there great differences between “quality” translation agencies and the chop-shops.
So why exactly should a business prefer a translation agency over cutting out the middleman and going with a freelance translator? Well, it’s much the same question as whether to hire a law office with a team of lawyers or hire just one individual lawyer or, indeed, create a legal affairs office within the company (or any combination of these three basic solutions). In fact, it’s much the same as deciding whether (and how) to outsource any function a company needs for its operations.
The main problem with a business going direct to a freelance translator is that, like with most lawyers, freelancers are specialized in just a few fields and just a few (or one) language pairs. So if a business has a frequent need for fairly urgent translations in a variety of languages, they are going to need to hire several freelancers, not just one. So the problem becomes how to select and then manage all of those freelancers. Does the business know how to assess the quality of a freelance translator’s work? Maybe, but more than likely not. And do they set up a specific office to organize and manage translations and translators? Or do they let everyone in the company fend for themselves when they need a translation done? I think you start to see the problem, as well as the parallels with other business functions….
So sure, some businesses may find that it’s best for them to go direct to the freelance translators (or to do so for specific types of projects), but given the highly specialized skill set needed to execute and manage translation projects, I would say that most businesses would be better served by a high-quality translation agency that can advise them on how best to manage their translation needs, in much the same way that many businesses would be best served by an external law office with a team of lawyers.
And this is before considering the translation-specific issue of proofreading. What about that? If it’s better to cut out the middleman, should a business also arrange for their own proofreaders? Or does the freelancer handle that? If the freelancer handles it, does that mean proofreading one’s own work? Personally, I would hope not (but that’s a topic for another blog post…). Or do we arrange for a proofreader and bill the cost to the customer? If so, then we’re already on our way to becoming agencies ourselves….
Anyway, this is why I think we freelance translators should be careful about bashing translation agencies generally and should focus our efforts on promoting “quality” translation agencies and perhaps even raising awareness about the great many chop-shops out there and how to recognize them. That segment of translation agencies is something of a plague for our industry.

Regards
Mohd.Shadab
www.troikaa.co.in
info@troikaa.co.in