I have many friends who are business owners here and they outsource the translation of their documents. Usually this price is included in a larger deal, kind of like a McDonalds value meal whereby the 3rd party will do some consutling, provide some useless resutlts and then translate them into ‘English’.The way it works is like this:
company A contracts with company B for a market study. The price is U$200,000. The price includes fees to be paid to the principals, those doing the work, expenses and of course translations. Lets assume for the sake of argument that the translation portion occupies 5% or U$10,000.
What happens is that the local chinese company fumbles along, cuts and pastes from the net and adds little to no value, aside from providing killer massages and some really good back rubs…. settign that aside, they will inundate you with phone calls, fly all over china, claim they are so tired and at the end of the day cut and paste someone else’s work from some website. Then they will provide you with a ‘translation’ the understanding of which will drive you batty. The reason is that being a chinese company, they will cut corners when possible and being chinese they believe one of the easiest is in their english translation, after all, how hard can it be, they’ve studied english all their lives right..
So my friend receives shitty work like this…
“Dear honorable customer, XXX provide this translation for your looking
xxx is good its advantage is charge efficiency high and its effect on service life of xxx msall, also, it charge can in valley period of grid. ”
So I look at my friends and tell them it’s incomprehensible and to send it back. The problem is that the guy running the translation already pocketed the 10k and now does not want to give it back. So he’s farmed out the work to some students whose English is basically shite…
This is China