How to Save Money on Translation Agencies (with Budget Planning Worksheet)

Contents

Got a lot of content to translate? Handing everything over to agencies may be the easiest option, but high quality translations can get expensive fast. As your content demands grow, so will your costs—making it harder to scale effectively.

In this guide, we'll uncover hidden agency costs, share practical strategies to cut expenses, and introduce tools to help you set up a cost-efficient translation process. Plus, we’ll include case studies and success stories from companies that have reduced their translation costs by up to 80%.

Overview

The hidden costs of outsourcing translations

6 ways to save money on translation agencies

Savings calculator and budget planning worksheet

The hidden costs of outsourcing translations

When you work with translation agencies, the quoted price isn't always the full story. There are several hidden costs that can significantly impact your budget:

1. Repetitive content that gets translated and billed multiple times

Consider a company that regularly updates its product manuals. Each manual might contain 30% of repeated content from previous versions, such as safety instructions or standard features. However, many agencies charge the full rate for this repeated text.

For example, say that you need to translate a 10,000-word manual with 3,000 repeated words from your previous manuals.

Manual word count	10,000 words
Repeated content from previous manuals	3,000
Per-word rate	$0.22 / €0.20
Total cost for one language pair	$2,200 (10,000 x 0.22) / €2000 (10,00 x 0.20)
Cost of repeated content for one language pair	$660 (3,000 x 0.22) / €600 (3,000 x 0.20)

If you update this manual quarterly in 5 languages, you're paying $13,200 (or €12,000) annually for content you've already translated!

Over time, this can significantly inflate your translation budget, especially for companies with extensive documentation and frequent updates.

2. The time you spend on revising deliverables to fit quality standards

Agencies may not always have the specific industry knowledge or understand your brand voice.

This often results in additional time and resources spent by your in-house team and distributors to revise and edit their work, ensuring it aligns with your standards.

As Korena Xie, Head of Assurance Methodology at Moore Global, told us:

“If we engage external translators, it will still come back to us to do the final check. I've been involved in different projects where I still have to spend time to review the external translator’s work. So I pick up on those things which need to be corrected because they may not be accountants or auditors, and some terms may have a specific reference in the accounting standards or auditing standards.”

3. The time you spend on manually preparing files for translation handover

Before sending your content to an agency, you often spend significant time preparing files. This process can be tedious and time-consuming.

It typically involves:

Extracting text from InDesign files into Word documents or Excel spreadsheets
Formatting PowerPoint presentations to separate text from design elements
Creating context notes for translators about specific terms or phrases
Compiling style guides and glossaries for each project
Organizing and naming files for multiple languages and versions.

To put this into perspective, preparing a 50-page product catalog for translation might take 3-4 hours. If you're doing this for quarterly updates in just 5 languages, that's 60-80 hours per year spent just on file preparation!

Pia Andresen, Marketing Coordinator at EMS, shared a similar experience:

“We were updating our core brochure. It has around 60 pages, and we needed to translate it into 15 languages to cover our main markets. So I started to copy-paste all the text of this 60-page brochure into an Excel file. And I said, this is so time-consuming; it will cost me days only to copy-paste the whole text into Excel. We knew we need to find a better solution here because I could do so many better things in this time.”

4. The time you spend on tracking progress

Managing multiple translation projects across different languages can consume a significant portion of your workday.

This often involves a constant stream of fragmented communication:

Sending emails to check on the status of various language translations.
Scheduling and attending progress calls with agency project managers.
Clarifying instructions or answering questions about context or terminology.
Coordinating between your internal team and the agency for reviews and approvals.

All these tasks add up quickly, taking your time away from more strategic work you could be doing to enable your company’s growth.

5. Slower time to market

Agencies need time to secure the right linguists and capacity for your project, which can extend timelines. This may delay your product launches or campaigns in new markets.

For urgent projects, agencies often charge premium rates for rushed work, sometimes 25% to 50% more. This leaves you choosing between higher costs or slower market entry.

James Bauer, Technical Writer, told us this was one of the main factors for taking their translation projects in-house during his time at Carlisle Fluid Technologies:

"We can't wait on [the translation agency] for three weeks or four weeks because of the amount of money that we're losing when we can't ship a product.”

Now, let’s talk about how you can streamline your translation process, reduce costs, and maintain quality—whether you choose to continue with agencies or handle it in-house.

6 ways to save money on translation agencies

1. Use translation memories for reusing and repurposing past translations

Translation memory (TM) is a feature found in many translation management tools, including Redokun. It works like a smart database that remembers every sentence you've ever translated. It automatically stores these translations and suggests them when similar content appears in future projects. This means you're not starting from scratch every time.

Here's how TM can save you money:

Reduced word count: TM identifies repeated content across all your projects, so you only pay for new or changed text.
Faster turnaround: Translators can work more quickly with pre-translated segments.
Improved consistency: Using previously approved translations ensures your brand voice stays consistent across all content.

Chris Schmidt, Managing Director at WhizCut, experienced this firsthand with Redokun. After inviting his translation vendors and partners to translate their documents inside Redokun, he reduced his translation costs by 80%. He explains the compounding benefits of using translation memory:

"It helps with the translations today, but it makes every translation in the future easier. This is the key for us. I know that the next catalog we do, it'll take less and less time the more data we get in. The more I work with it, the better the tool works."

In one instance, Chris was quoted €5,000 by translation agencies for a project. By using Redokun's translation memory and other features, he was able to reduce the word count from 50,000 to just 10,000 words needing translation. This resulted in the final cost being only a fifth of the original quote, saving WhizCut thousands of euros on a single project.

2. Involve in-house team members and external stakeholders in the translations

While it's true that professional translators bring linguistic expertise, your in-house team can be an untapped resource, especially for companies looking to control costs. They know your products, industry, and brand voice better than anyone, making them a valuable asset in the translation process.

Barbara Stivan, Marketing Manager at DEA System, found success by involving local in-house staff using Redokun as their collaborative translation tool:

"We realized that the cost [of translation agencies] was very high and their level of knowledge of technical language and local idioms was not so high. So we needed people who worked within our company, knew our philosophy and knew the industry well."

DEA System now uses their technical support staff for translations, as they know both the local language and the company's products intimately. Surprisingly, this approach not only improved quality but also boosted team morale, thanks to Redokun's user-friendly interface.

Barbara notes:

"A couple of months later, the emails started coming in [from our branches], in short, where they told me that doing the translations now had also become fun."

3. Create a glossary for each target language to ensure quality and consistency

A well-maintained glossary is crucial for brand integrity and clarity across all your translated content. It's a list of important terms, phrases, and their approved translations for each target language.

Redokun's built-in glossary feature makes this process effortless. As translators work, Redokun automatically highlights and suggests glossary terms whenever they appear in the text. The tool makes it easy to create and manage terms, includes context-specific entries with usage notes, and even supports import/export functionality for added flexibility.

4. Reduce time spent on file handling and formatting

Managing translation assets can be a time-consuming task, especially when dealing with multiple file formats and versions.

With Redokun, you can easily upload documents in various formats, including InDesign, Word, and PowerPoint. The system automatically extracts text for translation while preserving the original formatting. This eliminates the need for manual text extraction and reformatting, saving hours of work.

In addition, Redokun's revision feature allows you to track changes and updates across all your documents.

Whenever you need to update a translated document, simply upload the new version, and Redokun will highlight only the changed text for translation.

By streamlining asset management, you can significantly reduce the time spent on administrative tasks.

Kenni Andersen, Graphics Team Lead at Rockfon, says that:

"We are saving between 60 to 70% of our time now because the whole process of getting the file ready doesn’t take much. And then from that, uploading the files to Redokun is much faster. It takes about 1/10 of the time compared to having to do it manually through creating and sending email files."

5. Automate manual tasks related to project coordination

Project coordination often involves numerous repetitive tasks that can eat up valuable time. Automating these tasks can lead to significant time and cost savings.

Redokun offers several automation features to streamline your workflow:

Automatic task assignment: Automatically assign translation tasks to specific team members or vendors based on language pairs.

Assigning translators to a document in Redokun

Notification system: Receive alerts for important events like task completion, and send automatic notifications to translators when they’ve been assigned a task.

Mail translator receives when assigned a task in Redokun — Email translator receives when assigned a task in Redokun

Progress tracking: Check the project progress status across all languages at a glance without having to manually check in with each translator.

Document list with progress tracking in Redokun

Communication on project details: Your translators can ping you or other team members inside Redokun with questions about specific translations.

By automating these coordination tasks, you can reduce the time and money spent on project management and ensure smoother communication across your translation team.

6. Use a translation management system to manage and collaborate on tasks

A translation management system (TMS) like Redokun brings all these cost-saving strategies together into one efficient platform. It serves as a central hub for managing your entire translation process, reducing manual tasks and maintaining consistency and quality.

If you’re looking for ways to control translation costs while keeping up with growing content demands, check out our upcoming webinar, How to Control Translation Costs as Your Content Demand Grows, to see how Redokun can help.

Use the budget planning worksheet to maximize your savings

Now that we’ve introduced strategies to cut translation costs, you can take the next step by using our Budget Planning Worksheet. These tools make it easy to map out your current expenses and visualize potential future savings for stakeholders.

Translation budget planning worksheet

Our Translation Budget Planning Worksheet is designed to give you a clear overview of your translation expenses and help you plan ahead. It allows you to:

Break down your fixed and variable costs, such as software fees and translator hours.
Estimate how often you’ll need translations and calculate the associated costs.
Identify potential cost-saving opportunities, like reusing translations or automating file preparation.
Track your budget over time, comparing your planned costs to actual expenses to avoid overruns.

Screenshot of Redokun's translation budget planning worksheet.

Start saving time and money on translations today

Ready to take control of your translation costs? Sign up for a free trial of Redokun today and get 10,000 words for free.

Article by

Via (Vilde) Olaussen

Via Olaussen est un rédactrice hautement qualifiée doublée d'une spécialiste de growth marketing appliqué à la localisation et les SaaS.

Avec plus de 8 ans d'expérience internationale en Europe, en Asie et en Amérique latine, elle a développé une expertise approfondie en matière de gestion de projet, de génération de demande et de stratégies marketing globales.

De plus, ses plus de quatre années passées en tant que traductrice et spécialiste de la localisation lui ont permis de maîtriser la communication dans plusieurs langues, dont le norvégien, l'anglais et le coréen. Les idées et les stratégies de Via ont considérablement bénéficié aux clients améliorant ainsi leurs efforts marketing globaux.