How Did We Evaluate the TransPerfect Website?
We have received multiple requests to investigate and review a translation service, TransPerfect.com. These requests have come from both customers interested in translation and professional translators. As usual, we began by researching the company as deeply as we could. Regretfully a majority of the transperfect reviews that are online are largely negative. There are clearly people who are unhappy with the way they have been treated by this company. Having said that, we should also note that there don’t appear to be any official complaints lodged with the consumer protection agency, BBB. In addition to researching the company, we also spent time exploring the TransPerfect website. Our last step was to order translation services and make payment. When we received our documents, we sought the help of another translator to verify the documents for accuracy, proper grammar, and spelling.
The List of Translation Services Provided
This translation service does have a large offering of translation and related services. They advertise multicultural marketing, staffing and recruiting, interpretation, translation, training, localization, e learning, software translation services, and more. However they offer a lot of languages for translation (French, Chinese, Italian translation services, Japanese, Latin translation services are among them). They also offer a tools for translators, storage of documents, and CMS integration. They serve a variety of industries including retail, legal, and finance.
For this review, we placed an order to have thirty page business contract translated from Russian to English. Keep reading to learn more.
The Pricing Matters & Special Features
This translation service doesn’t display prices on their website. Because of this, it’s difficult for potential clients to get an idea of what their overall costs will be. We had to submit content information along with details about the documents we wanted to have translated. We then received a price quote later. We are sad to say the final price we paid was very high.
Detecting The Quality of Services
One way to detect that a translation company is using machine translation rather than relying on a professional translator is awkward word usage. This is because the machine doesn’t understand context. For example, humongous is a synonym of big. That doesn’t mean the word for big in another language should be translated into humongous. Sadly, our document was full of mistakes like this.
While it is sometimes necessary to rely on machine translation, this was not the case here. A high priced translation of less than 100 pages with plenty of time to complete should have been done by a human.
Further, when our translator friend looked at our document and compared it to the original they found errors in fact as well as many missing elements. This was in no way a good translation.
Know Pros & Cons
Here are some pros and cons to help summarize our experience.
Pros:
- They Provide Many Services
- We Received Our Work on Time
Cons:
- Poor Quality Translation
- Dishonestly Uses Machine Translation
- Prices Are Too High
Our Final Verdict
Please understand that we don’t take this lightly, however we must issue a strong warning for both potential clients and translators to avoid using Transperfect translations. Not only was our experience exceptionally bad in so many different areas, it appears that negative experiences are the norm here. That is why we encourage anyone considering the best translation services to look elsewhere. This is clearly not a case where our bad experience was an anomaly.
If you are in need of a good translator, please keep reading translation reviews at Translation Report. We strongly believe that you will find one of the services we recommend to be exactly what you need.
