Last February, I wrote a post entitled Is the translation crowdsourcing market getting too crowded? That post, which discussed some of the new online translation companies, asked some basic questions: is there enough business to support all of these companies? and if this is such a good business, how come more translation companies are not getting into it?
But I neglected to address the most important issues: what is the quality of these translations and how cost-effective are they?
Ever since I wrote that post, I wanted to write a followup post by trying out some of these services and reporting on the results. So I prepared a small file which contained about 400 English words of technical text and tried to order a Spanish translation of that file from a few of the online companies. The results are presented in this post. Surprisingly (to me at least), the results indicate that buyers should stay away from these services and stick to the old fashion translation agencies. At least if they want good results.
One general comment: at GTS we charge about $0.15 per English word for English into Spanish technical/medical texts, or $60 for our test file. This includes translation which is reviewed by a second translator, to yield high quality results. For higher volumes of work, we can discount this price. So as a rule, I decided not to order from any online service that charges more than $0.15 per word.
Ready? Here are the results: continue reading…
