5 Simple Steps to Find the Best Vietnamese Translation Services in Singapore

By typing the keyword “Best Vietnamese translation services in Singapore“, you will receive over 18 million results within a matter of a second. The problem is the more results you get, the more you feel lost and confused. How to tell which one of those Singapore-based Vietnamese language providers is your right choice?

Vietnamese translation agencies in Singapore vary greatly in size, quality, price, and customer service. A simple Google search is far from capable of getting you the “perfect” Vietnamese translation services you are looking for. To achieve this goal, you need a clear strategy – one that can tell you how to find suitable candidates and how to evaluate their ability to handle your Vietnamese translation projects.

As a professional Vietnamese translation agency, we have experienced this process multiple times ourselves as well as consulting our clients with one. Speaking honestly from our experience, it is no easy task and it takes a lot of time for your team. But don’t worry. That’s why we are here to help. In this blog post, we will show you 5 simple steps to select the best Vietnamese translation services in Singapore. Please note that you might need to make some changes or adaptions in the process we propose so that it can work perfectly for you.

Step 1 – Choose the type of translation resources to work on your Vietnamese translation projects

Before beginning your search for the best Vietnamese translation services in Singapore, your team needs to decide which types of translation resources you want to work with. This decision directly affects the platforms and methods you will use later on.

There are three options for translation partners:

In-house Translators 

Having a team of Vietnamese translators within your company (in-house translators) saves you a great deal of time when you have projects that need handling urgently on a regular basis. You will only have to spend time and effort recruiting them once. As in-house translators tend to work with you for a long-term period, they are likely to understand your company services/products as well as your brand voices, which helps guarantee the consistency and accuracy of the translations.

However, this option is only cost-effective if your team regularly has a high number of Vietnamese translation projects.

Freelance Translators

In case your demands for Vietnamese translations are small, working with freelance translators seems like a better choice. The rates they offer are usually cheaper compared to translation agencies because you communicate and work directly with them, cutting the cost for an intermediary.

One big problem is your team have to handle all the coordination yourself. Besides, there is a limitation to the types and number of translation tools and localization management platforms that freelancers can offer.

Professional Translation Agencies

Although working with a professional Vietnamese translation agency costs you more than cooperating with freelancers, the former has great advantages of

• • Providing services for a wide range of services (besides translation), Vietnamese language pairs, types of content, and CAT Tools;
  • Having the capacity for high-volume or urgent projects;
  • Helping you with coordinating projects.

Some common types of services that a professional Vietnamese translation agency provides

Step 2 – Search for potential resources

Once you have made up your mind about the type of translation resources you wish to cooperate with, let’s begin searching and making a list of potential candidates. Many methods can be applied in this step. You can start by using search engines, then asking around your networks, or reading reviews.

Using search engines

To make these searches effective, you shouldn’t use too general keywords such as “Translation services” or “Vietnamese translation services” which give you the name of companies all over the world, not just in Singapore. Try more detailed keywords like “Vietnamese translation services in Singapore” or “Vietnamese translation company in Singapore”. You can also add the language pair and content type in your search box. For example, “English to Vietnamese translation services in Singapore” or “Legal Chinese to Vietnamese translation services in Singapore”.

Asking for recommendations from friends or colleagues

You can start a post on Linkedin to ask for your connections’ recommendations on a good translation agency or freelance translator based in Singapore. As the demands for global expansion of businesses grow strongly in recent years, there must be at least a colleague or a friend of yours who has experience working with a translation agency before. Even if they cannot give you the name of a good one, they might still warn you to stay away from a certain agency from which they had a bad experience.

Reading review pages

Some people doubt the accuracy of online reviews so they don’t bother checking them out due to the fact that many review pages are swarmed with fake reviews from the business owners themselves or their competitors. The thing is reading the stories or experiences of other clients bring you so many benefits that it would be a shame if you completely ignore them. When it comes to finding a list of the best Vietnamese translation services in Singapore, we recommend you have a look at the following three quality review pages:

• • Singapore’s Finest – Besides a list of the finest translation services in Singapore, Singapore’s Finest features a special company story that tells you more about the services and working process of your candidate.
  • Clutch.co – Reviews on this platform can only be made via a verified LinkedIn account or an interview with Clutch employees. Thus, you can rest assured that every review is legit.

A review GTE Localize received on Clutch.co

• • Goodfirms.co – Like Clutch, reviewers need an account to be able to post a review on GoodFirms. They are also required to provide details about the project such as company name, word count, budget, and rating.

Step 3 – Make a shortlist of the best Vietnamese translation services in Singapore

From step 2, you get a list of all translation agencies in Singapore that provide Vietnamese translation. However, this list is still too general. What you should do next is to set some criteria to narrow down this list to only around 5 to 7 candidates. What you should look into are:

• • The number of language pairs they provide – Some local agencies might be only familiar with one or two language pairs relating to the Vietnamese language. If you need to translate your content into a wide range of language pairs, then these local agencies are not qualified. What you should look for in this situation is a regional or global agency.
  • Types of services they provide – For some internal content, translation is the only needed step. However, for more important content intended for publishing outside the organization, you will need both translation, editing, and proofreading services. What’s more, documents that contain a high amount of visuals might need to undergo the Desktop Publishing (DTP) step.
  • Company’s portfolio – We recommend you work with a Singapore company that has long experience in Vietnamese translations or should at least have a few relevant previous projects to yours.

Step 4 – Compare their competences

In this step, you should contact your shortlisted candidates via emails or phone calls with a list of questions as we recommend in this post. Once you get all the answers, you can create a table to compare their competencies to serve your requests:

• • Rate – Every company out there guarantees to bring you the best Vietnamese translation services in Singapore at the cheapest or most affordable rates. Don’t fall for that too quickly. What you should look for is not the one that offers the lowest rate but the one that offers the most value-for-money rate, i.e. the rate that is within your budget and proportionate with the expected quality.
  • Reviews – Besides reading reviews from former clients of the candidates as we suggested in the second step, you should also check out the reviews from translators who have worked with these companies. The reason is simple. A good translation partner is the one who not only serves customers well but also treats their translators in a good manner (e.g. always pay a reasonable rate and on time). You can visit ProZ to see translator reviews.
  • Customer services – When mailing your candidates, pay attention to their responses. Do they give you clear and informative answers to all questions? Are they responsive?
  • Certification – For translators, those who have undergone proper training in languages and translation (e.g. a Bachelor’s Degree in Translation or ATA Certification) stand out as better candidates as these certifications show their expertise and commitment in translation. For translation agencies, you should consider those with ISO 9001:2015 for Quality management system or/and ISO 17100:2015 Requirements for translation services.
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  GTE Localize’s ISO Certificate and Memberships

  • Other factors – Payment methods, Supported translation tools and management platforms, after-hours support, willingness to sign NDA, etc.

After taking all these factors into consideration, your list of potential candidates should be narrowed down to just 3 names.

Step 5 – Test their ability for Vietnamese translation services

Most translation agencies or freelance translators are willing to do a small free test of no more than 300 words. In case you want them to do a longer test, we suggest you pay for the test as a pilot project. From your side, the test plays the role of evaluating the quality of the Vietnamese translation services that your candidates offer. From your candidate’s side, they can understand better the content and your expectations which help them perform better when working on real projects.

To evaluate the test translations, we recommend you have a review team of at least two people. One is an experienced native Vietnamese reviewer to check the linguistic aspect and the other is familiar with your business’s products/services and industry’s terms. By now, you should be able to rank your candidates from best to worst and find out the best Vietnamese translation services in Singapore for your projects.

One tip drawn from our experience is that you should always notify all candidates of the test results, even if they fail. Because sometimes, you encounter unexpected situations when the real project is running, for example, your chosen language provider cannot meet the deadline or the quality does not meet your expectation. To make sure the translations are ready for your business plan, you might need to contact the other candidates to support you.

Wrap Up

We hope by following our proposed process above, you will be successful in finding the best Vietnamese translation services in Singapore. Good luck with your project!

GTE Localize is a professional translation agency based in Singapore and Vietnam. We have a team of both in-house and freelance native Vietnamese who can handle a wide range of Vietnamese content for you. Drop us a line and receive a free quotation for your Vietnamese translation services within 24 hours.