Translation Services Review

Ever since speakers of different languages found it necessary and beneficial to interact with each other, people with the ability to translate or interpret languages have facilitated constructive communications among nations, trade partners and individuals. In the 21st century, translation services are connecting the people, governments and businesses of the world by localizing web content and optimizing search engines specific to many human languages and dialects. We invite you to explore further by reading articles about translation services as well as reviews of TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award winner Net-Translators, TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award winner Dynamic Language and TopTenREVIEWS Bronze Award winner Foreign Translations. At TopTenREVIEWS We Do the Research So You Don’t Have To.™

Translation Services: What to Look For

The most popular translation services offer a wide range of capabilities in common. Some offer specialties that distinguish them from their competitors. We found it useful to rank the relative strengths of translation services by considering their high technology capabilities in addition to their translation services.

High Technology Capabilities
Every professional language translation service in our review offers desktop publishing for translated documents. A few are sufficiently technical to offer localization of software, medical devices and video games. All but one provides international search engine optimization (SEO) for localized web content. Unless localized web content is optimized with keywords that specific language speakers search for, the content will not appear high on any search results.

Document Translation
Translation refers to written communication. All of the translation services that we examined offer many language translation pairs from a pool of at least 30 languages, with some capable of more than 100 languages. All of them also translate documents for the financial, healthcare, legal, marketing and technical industries. One of the professional translation vendors offers literary translations.

Interpretation has to do with the spoken word. A few translation services offer interpreting over the phone, 24 hours a day, seven days a week – a great convenience to health care providers and anyone who needs to break through language barriers whenever they arise. Services with interpreters are also available for onsite interpretation projects within and around the cities where they are headquartered. Interpreters do not have the luxury of poring over a source document to create the perfect translation. Interpreters diplomatically transpose spoken messages in real time for live audiences.

If you tune into the quality of the professional assigned to receive requests for projects, you will usually be able to accurately predict the overall quality of the vendor. Every one of the services in our review responds quickly and professionally to requests for quotes submitted through their web sites. Some of them respond within a few minutes with a quote. Some respond within a few hours. We have excluded any translation services that were less responsive. Once you approve the quote, a short document of a few pages is completed within four or five days by a good interpreting and translation company. A larger translation project of say, 25,000 words, is completed in two or three weeks. When it is time to translate a document that must be as accurate as possible for business, legal, diplomatic or personal reasons, there is no substitute for human-powered translation services.