Your financial translation specialist

The translation industry is teeming with myriad service providers, making it very difficult to understand. How then can you choose which service provider is best able to meet your expectations? How can pitfalls be avoided? How much does a high-quality translation cost? Questions abound, none of which are easy to answer when you find yourself trekking alone through this linguistic jungle.

We certainly do not aim to dictate your choice, but nevertheless we would like to highlight some factors which are worth taking into consideration.

There are three types of service providers within the industry: freelances, translation agencies (or brokers) and translation companies.

The number of freelances working in translation is probably greater than in any other sector. Unfortunately, as access to the profession is not regulated, the industry is host to a great many so-called professionals who have no qualifications and even fewer scruples. These "professionals" will not hesitate to slash prices in order to attract clients who believe that they are getting a good deal... only to be quickly disillusioned. Such behaviour tarnishes the reputation of the industry as a whole and is a source of great annoyance to genuine professionals, who find themselves up against unfair competition.

While certain freelances work directly with multinationals and other companies frequently requiring translation services, their main clients, as a general rule, are either translation agencies or translation companies. Indeed, it is easier for translation consumers to work with a single service provider which has extensive resources at its disposal, is capable of providing translations in all languages and will select the translators that best correspond to their clients' needs. This saves them a lot of time and worry.

Translation agencies do not employ any in-house translators; instead, they work exclusively with freelances. In essence, their core business is not actual translation but rather translation management. This model therefore offers very little added value, apart from the selection and evaluation of freelances. Yet these agencies still need to find the linguistic resources to do this... Indeed, how can you assess a Spanish translator if nobody within the agency has a good grasp of this language? And then there is the issue of specialisation...

Translation companies, on the other hand, work with their own in-house teams of translators, backed up by networks of hand-picked freelances. Translation constitutes the core of their business and is the primary, if not sole, source of their income. TALK finance belongs to this segment of the industry, as do the majority of niche service providers - in other words, service providers specialised exclusively in a very specific field.

Without a doubt, this specialisation is wherein lies the strength of a company such as ours. While some of our competitors try to cater for a multitude of sectors in order to reach the largest possible number of clients, we specifically opted to relinquish a significant share of the market in order to dedicate all our resources and energy to strengthening our knowledge of our field of specialisation and to training our in-house translators - and it shows in the quality of our work!