When Two Words Cost $100,000 to Translate
Imagine your company operates in a high-stakes environment. What's your cost risk in case a translation mistake causes your product to fail catastrophically? $10,000? $100,000? More?
Here's a true story that happened 20 years ago, when I was working in software localization.
When Translations Crashed an Industrial Application
I had just started working with a large new client that made industrial software. They wanted some UI translation updates for the German version of one of their components, a program that processed plant alarms and passed them on to other systems. So, a rather important piece of software. Because if something goes wrong in your plant, you really, really, REALLY want to know, right?
As I added the new translations to the resource files, I looked around a bit, skimming the old strings for context and terminology. A few strange-looking translations caught my eye. They didn't look like ordinary UI—rather like internal codes that shouldn't have been translated in the first place.
That kind of mystery always makes me curious. I had the client's software installed on a separate system. So I fired it up and started going through the features where I thought those strange translations might have been used.
And then, at one point... the software crashed. That little but important piece of alarm processing software went down and didn't recover.
Was that related to those strange-looking text strings? I patched them back to their original English content, tried again… and sure enough, the error went away.
The conclusion was a bit unnerving: Errors in the translation process had crashed a potentially mission-critical piece of software.
Why You Need to Rethink Translation Cost
What do we take away from this? For one, it's important to right-size your quality requirements based on business risk. In this case, the offending text strings shouldn't have been exposed to translators in the first place. Novice translators probably won't notice a problem like that. That's why in a high-risk environment, you need experienced resources—people who would notice the issue and report it to your localization engineers so they can fix it.
But my main point today is: You need to start looking at translation cost differently. Those faulty software strings only cost a few cents to translate. But what if those defects had actually crashed the software in a high-risk production environment, like a power plant or a chemical facility? Even if there is no physical damage, plant downtime is hugely expensive. And that means a cost risk for whoever caused it. Damage payments, lost customers, bad PR, et cetera. Those are costs that, at the end of the day, are caused by translation—because you wouldn't have incurred them if you hadn't done that translation. And that's what I mean when I say that two words can cost you $100,000 to translate.
To better capture this, we use a concept that we call “Total Cost of Translation” or TCT. It's kind of similar to something you probably already know: TCO, or Total Cost of Ownership. The basic idea of TCO is that to get a realistic view of an asset's cost, it's not enough to only look at initial capital outlay; you also have to consider the cost of operating and maintaining the asset over its entire lifecycle.
Total Cost of Translation Explained
Similarly, looking at TCT means that it's not enough to just track per-word or hourly rates for language services. All buyers do that. If they are smart, they also look at their overhead cost for processing each order. But they almost never consider other types of cost that are essential in getting a complete picture of translation cost. Those include:
- Additional overhead due to internal friction when translation quality doesn't meet local stakeholders' expectations. This is something we see again and again. Your country managers don't like what they see, they call in a meeting, and boom, there's another $1,000 of overhead.
- Hidden cost to other departments, such as when misleading or unclear translations in product instructions cause additional work for service and support staff.
- Damages when incorrect or misleading translations cause physical or monetary damage or even bodily injury (think safety notes or critical software UI).
- Opportunity cost related to all of the above—which, after all, reflect wasted resources that could be put to much greater use. For example, your engineers having to fix translation issues instead of working on hot new products.
- Lost revenue and profits as well as reputational damage when customer-facing translations, especially in sales & marketing, deliver subpar performance. In some industries this isn't much of an issue because customers don't care. In others, it definitely is.
In most organizations, these costs go unnoticed, or, in the case of damages and error costs, they might be reported under a heading like “extraordinary expenses”. But they are related to an identifiable cause in your regular operations, namely: translation. And that's why we strongly recommend reporting them as such in your cost accounting. This will give you a more complete view of your translation-related expenses, and more robust evidence for right-sizing translation quality based on business risk.
A More Robust Foundation for Understanding Translation Cost
If you've got questions on any of this, send us a message or request a free consultation on translation strategy & processes. Our consultations come with our unique $100 guarantee: If we're wasting your time, we'll give you a $100 gift card or make a $100 donation to a cause that matters to you. (Terms and conditions apply.) Thanks for reading, and see you again next time!
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