5 Common Mistakes When Looking for Vietnamese Retail Translation Services

When entering the Vietnamese market, using Vietnamese retail translation services to turn your content into Vietnamese is one of the keys to getting closer to your Vietnamese-speaking audiences. Whether your content will attract new clients to your business or make a bad impression on them depends considerably on the quality of translations. Because no matter how excellent your source content is, your clients only see the translated Vietnamese version.

So don’t waste your outstanding content by getting sloppy translations. Try to avoid the 5 common mistakes below when you seek Vietnamese retail translation services for your upcoming projects.

#1. Have No Plans 

“Well, it’s only a small project with a few pages that need translating. Why bothers making a plan?” Some people may ask. The reason why you need a proper plan for your Vietnamese retail translation services is simple. Without a proper plan, you will end up using rush translation which might cost you 1.5 to 2 times than the regular translation. In addition, with a limited timeframe, it is not easy for you to find the most suitable translation partners to work with which might result in bad translation quality. Every business expects a cost-effective project so a rush translation is the last thing you want.

Planning ahead for your Vietnamese retail translation project, by contrast, gives you enough time to look for a good translation partner, test their ability, and choose to work with the best. As you head-ups your translators in advance, you can save a great deal of money for your business.

What should your plan have?

• • Scope of your project – Which part of your retail documents needs translating? Which level of translation do you need – Translation Only (TO), Translation + Editing (TE), or Translation + Editing + Proofreading (TEP)? Will you need extra services like DTP, LSO, etc.?
  • Audiences – You should include your Vietnamese audience profiles in your plan so that your translators can make the right choice for language and writing styles. For example, there are some differences in the Vietnamese used by audiences living in Vietnam and Vietnamese communities in foreign countries. Thus the translated versions for these two audience groups must not be the same.
  • Expected turn-around time – When will you need your translated documents ready? Estimating the turn-around time will help you determine when your Vietnamese retail translation project should be kicked off to meet your business’ schedule.
  • Budget – In case the quotations you receive from your translation candidates are out of the budget, you can optimize the content to reduce the cost. For example, you can rewrite long sentences to cut down on the number of words or remove low-priority content from the project.

#2. Do Not Ask Enough Questions

When it comes to a Vietnamese retail translation project, quality, money, and turn-around time are the three most important factors that all businesses care about. Therefore, they might be the only three questions you ask your translation partners. Trust us, it is one of the biggest yet commonest mistakes people make when finding translation services.

You need to ask your candidates a lot of questions to understand how they manage your translations (working process), how much experience they have in providing Vietnamese retail translation services, what types of tools they use, and many more. Only by asking questions can you find out if they are your right choice.

Below are 6 groups of basic questions you need to ask your translation candidates:

• • Their company profile
  • Their security and data protection standards or policies
  • Their translation services
  • Turnaround time and costs
  • Translation Tools and Translation Management System
  • Their customer services

#3. Go with the Cheapest Quotation

Don’t make mistakes by choosing translation services solely based on rates. You know the old saying “You get what you pay for”. No high-skilled Vietnamese translator accepts to work with ridiculously cheap rates. If you go with the cheapest quotation, the translation you receive is likely to be done by inexperienced translators or machines. This sloppy work will require a lot of edits or even re-translation.

Our advice is to always ask for quotations from many translation agencies to find out the average price of Vietnamese retail translation services. Then after evaluating their translation quality through a test, you can make the decision that balances both price and quality.

#4. Only Use Machine Translation or Do Not Use Translation Tools at All 

Machine translation is able to give you a translated document in a matter of minutes or a few hours at a very cheap rate. Languages are highly complex and flexible. Factors like context, cultures and social norms which affect the meanings and word choices cannot be understood by machines. Although machine translation tools have improved significantly in recent years, their quality is still questionable. Thus, you should only use machine translation when you just want to understand the gist of a text. You should never use machine translation for important external documents.

Machine Translation vs. Computer-Assisted Translation

But that does not mean you should not use any tools for your Vietnamese retail translation project. In fact, the use of Computer-Assisted Translation Tools (CAT Tools) is highly recommended. CAT Tools’ features namely Translation Memory and Termbase allow you to store previous translations that will automatically be used for future projects. They save you a great deal of time and money too since you do not have to re-translate or pay full price for repeated segments (words, phrases, or sentences) while boosting the accuracy and consistency of your Vietnamese translations.

We recommend you use human translators with the help of CAT Tools for all projects, both for internal and external purposes.

#5. Work with Translators with No Related Experience

There is a quote that is quite famous in the translation industry. “Knowing two languages does not make you a translator any more than having ten fingers to make you a pianist.” Not all bilinguals can become translators. And none of them can handle all types of content. You can not expect a medical translator to give you best-in-class retail translations.

To guarantee the quality of your Vietnamese retail translation project, you need professional translators who are native Vietnamese and have a solid background in the retail sector along with experience in translating retail content. Only by having long experience can your translators avoid common traps and mistakes in Vietnamese retail translation to bring you accurate outcomes at the shortest turnaround time.

Looking for Quality Vietnamese Retail Translation Services?

GTE Localize is a professional Vietnamese translation agency with a specialization in retail-related content. We have a team of in-house Vietnamese translators who are based in our office in Vietnam, along with a deep network of freelance Vietnamese translators around the world to help bring you closer to your Vietnamese-speaking audiences.

What makes our Vietnamese retail translation services stand out?

• • CAT Tools, QA Tools and other management tools are used for all Vietnamese retail translation projects.
  • Value-for-money translations – We offer the best quality at the most reasonable price.
  • All projects are in the good hands of native Vietnamese linguists with 5+ years of experience in translating retail-related content.
  • GTE Localize has successfully completed hundreds of Vietnamese retail translation projects and become a trusted partner of various companies around the world.

Talk to our localization experts and receive a free quotation!