How to Stretch Your LEP Translation Budget Now

Five Ways to Stretch Your Translation Budget—NOW! A v i a l a n g u ag e w h i t e pa p e r

Amid Tightened Budgets, an Increased Demand for Language Access Programs Between managing day-to-day delivery of services and controlling operating and outreach expenses, healthcare and education professionals are left with little time to focus on language access issues—and even less budget to implement successful language access programs. At the same time, under increased pressure to facilitate better healthcare access or more effective outreach to parents and community, these same professionals are tasked with finding ways to communicate with their diverse constituencies in a more meaningfully way. The language access professional sits at the confluence of these conflicting priorities. There are a number of factors shaping the growing need for successful language access programs: • Changing Demographics: As populations—especially in urban centers—grow increasingly diverse, cultural and language differences proliferate, enlarging the communities served, yet complicating the delivery of that service. Meeting this challenge requires a commitment to language access programs that combine quality, accuracy and cultural sensitivity with a specialized knowledge of healthcare or educational services, issues and vocabularies. • Proliferating Content: Even as populations are growing more varied, the amount of new information—on programs, services, technologies, etc.—is expanding exponentially. Delivering this ever-changing content to your culturally diverse audiences and keeping pace with ongoing updates and changes requires a language access program scaled to your needs and designed to accommodate change and growth. • LEP Requirements and Legislation: Increasingly, meeting the needs of your limited-Englishproficient (LEP) communities is becoming more than an ethical obligation: it is becoming a legal requirement as well. Especially in healthcare, some state laws are stipulating the delivery of patient information in appropriate languages when populations reach a specified percentage threshold. At the federal level, the Department of Health and Human Services has interpreted Title VI, which prohibits discrimination in any program receiving federal assistance, as encompassing language access. If you are just now beginning to face these challenges or are already struggling to meet them, the following five tips for cutting costs may help ease the way.

Five Ways to Stretch Your Translation Budget While Enabling Greater Language Access 1. Leverage past translations and translation memory for savings. On the average viaLanguage saves its customers 20 - 40% per year on translation through its viaLanguage Memory BankTM solution. Drawing on previous translations, translation memory applies that history—and translation decisions that were made—to future translations. This is especially useful for recurring documents that carry a high percentage of the same content from edition to edition. The more files that are input to the system, the more the system learns about the translation decisions made in the past and the more consistent and speedier the translations become. 2. Share documents and centralize your translation ordering. If you have multiple facilities within your organization and only certain items such as the facility names, addresses and phone numbers change, using a template can be a cost-effective way to pool resources. Additionally, you may look to centralize your translation ordering to take advantage of recurring documents and repeat content. This is not as difficult as it may sound. For example, through viaLanguage’s 24/7 online translation service (OLS), professional translations begin with the click of a mouse, enabling you to work on your schedule from any location and to get your job quickly and easily into the hands of a project manager for fast quoting and tracking.

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3. Save on desktop publishing costs. Consider decreasing the amount of desktop publishing (DTP) you do. Not all information needs to be put into a fancy format. When you add the cost of redoing a complicated DTP project to fit languages that may have a 25% expansion rate over English, the cost can increase substantially. viaLanguage can advise your design team on ways to save money when dealing with foreign language fonts, text expansion and file formats. 4. Assess your population and ensure translation is necessary. Before you begin translation, make sure to assess for whom the material is intended and if they are literate in their own language. Ensure that you understand their language, cultural, dialect and literacy level requirements. The point of this tip is to save institutions from making the common mistake of translating the 20-page education piece into Somali, for example, when few or none of the Somali audience can read their own language. In some cases what a particular group might need to implement the education initiative is an accessible interpreter, an audio recording and a one-page translation summarizing a few frequently asked questions and contact information for learning more. Translating in the wrong dialect is another example of misplaced translation effort and more common than you might expect. Doing so can elicit so much negative feedback that the piece needs to be re-translated. 5. Avoid last minute requests and rush fees. Be aware that in order to assure the highest quality standard the same five steps have to be undertaken whether the job needs to be back in one day or seven days. Thus higher fees may be incurred to turn the work around at the last minute. It helps to understand that these five steps are necessary to deliver a translation and/or localization job of the highest quality: 1. File preparation and translation memory setup 2. Translation editing and proofreading 3. Formatting 4. Quality assurance check 5. Review and delivery The industry standard is that translators, editors, and other translation service team members are paid 50%-100% more for rush requests. If your institution has regular 24-hour-turnaround needs, we suggest setting up a separate contract with your vendor to accommodate this level of workflow. Doing so will enable you and your vendor to work out a budget scaled more closely to your requirements.

Choose a Translation Partner Wisely

Of course, translation budgeting is only part of creating and managing an effective language access program. Selecting the right vendor is also key. As a full-service language service provider, viaLanguage has the right team, the right tools, and all the resources necessary to process your translation and localization jobs efficiently and cost-effectively in more than 50 languages—regardless of your project’s size or complexity. viaLanguage’s combination of expertise across the content spectrum, proven methodology, superior technology tools as well as a range of value-added services result in 99% on-time delivery with quality assurance checkpoints all along the way.

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Getting it right — every time When translating a language as multifarious as Spanish it can be difficult to ensure that everyone is receiving the same message. Following the steps above will allow you to streamline the process, while minimizing or eliminating many of the potential hazards along the way. The reward is accurate, timely translations that truly say what you mean.

Choose a Translation Partner Wisely Of course, translation budgeting is only part of creating and managing an effective language access program. Selecting the right vendor is also key. As a full-service language service provider, viaLanguage has the right team, the right tools, and all the resources necessary to process your translation and localization jobs efficiently and cost-effectively in more than 50 languages—regardless of your project’s size or complexity. viaLanguage’s combination of expertise across the content spectrum, proven methodology, superior technology tools as well as a range of value-added services result in 99% on-time delivery with quality assurance checkpoints all along the way.

Copyright 2009© viaLanguage. All Rights Reserved.