Why the right translator for you might not be locally based

We all love shopping local. It’s better for the environment, it helps to support local industry and it fosters a connection to the local community.

But what does shopping local really mean and is it the same in the translation industry as when buying items like clothes and books?

Let’s say you’re a destination marketing organisation promoting your city or region and you need your marketing materials translated into English to reach an international audience. Your first port of call may be to search for a translation provider in your area offering this service. So if you’re based in Berlin, you might search for tourism translation services in Berlin.

What you’ll find is a selection of translation companies in your city who will offer to translate your content into English. But in reality, what you’re dealing with here is a company with an office in Berlin, employing project managers who may or may not be based in Berlin, eventually trickling down to your translator who, well, could be anywhere in the world. You don’t know where they are or who they are. But they are almost certainly not in Berlin.

In your attempts to shop local, you end up choosing a multi-step service that is only partially locally based. Particularly at a time when boutique translation companies are becoming fewer and fewer, as they are gobbled up and acquired by large multinationals, translation is becoming less of a local service. So, by choosing your local option, you are really not getting a local service at all. 

Alternatively, you could choose to work directly with an independent translator. If you’re lucky, you may find one who lives in your city. In larger cities like Berlin, this may indeed be possible. But in most cases, professional translators live in the country of their target language (their native language), meaning that, if you’re getting content translated from German to English, most independent translators relevant to you will be living in an English-speaking country.

There are many benefits to working with an independent translator over a translation company (you can read more about this here), but chief among of them is the level of personal care you will get.

In other areas of life, when choosing between shopping local and using a large online retailer, the local option is the one that involves the smaller, independent provider. And it’s nice to feel the product in your hands before making your purchase.

However, in the case of translation, it’s often the other way around. Your local translation provider may well be the large, impersonal company operating a shopfront in your city, while the small, independent, online provider based somewhere like Ireland or the UK is the one who will give you the high level of care and great quality you’re looking for.