What You Need to Know Before You Pay for Freelance Spanish Translation Services

When your freelance Spanish translators have delivered their work, it is time for you to pay them. Before you make their payment, you need to ensure that the quality of their work is at par with your expectations. But if you don’t speak Spanish, how can you tell? The subjective nature of language makes it even more challenging to assess translation quality. In this article, we tell you how to determine whether the translation is of high quality and if you should proceed with paying them or send it back for revision.

Here are some tips on how to identify a high-quality translation:

1. The original meaning of the source must be communicated effectively in a way which is readable and comprehensible to the target audience. 

2. The translation must follow all the grammar rules of the Spanish language. For example, punctuation, capitalization, etc.

3. The translation should follow the conventional, dates, addresses and measurements which the target audience is comfortable with.

4. The terminology of the translation should be exactly the same as used by your target audience. You can make the use of a Spanish glossary of terms to ensure the accuracy of the terminology.

5. The style and tone of the source document should not be lost in the translation process.

6. Ensure that the translation uses the appropriate register and language according to the target audience.

7. The translation should incorporate any cultural factors that differ from the source language.

8. The translation should have all the paragraphs and pointers mentioned in the source document. Any misses can result in an incomplete translation and loss of meaning.

Setting up a post-translation review

To ensure all the tips listed above are covered efficiently, it is best to set up a post-translation review. You can employ an in-house reviewer if there are multiple projects in which you need to involve English to Spanish translators frequently. If there are documents that need to be translated on an ad-hoc basis, you can hire a freelance Spanish translation reviewer to do the job. 

These post-translation reviewers need to be fluent in both the source language and the target language, in this case, English and Spanish. When employing a reviewer, you need to ensure that they have the right qualifications. They should also be well-informed about the company as well as the content.

Through a post-translation review, the reviewer can professionally point out any linguistic or cultural errors in the translation. They can recognize the differences between mistakes and preferences. They will be able to make an informed decision by contextually reviewing the source document as well as the translation.

Using Translation Support Technology

The last thing you can do is to use a translation support technology to gauge whether the translation is relevant and consistent. These tools can help you determine whether the style and tonality of the translation align with the document. However, they should not be used as the only review tool. Since there are several contextual and cultural errors that they might miss out on.