21. Does it really need to be translated?

This is related to preparing a good original document. Take the time to remove irrelevant or redundant material. Rather than blindly translate documents in full, decide with your client or sales team which information is actually required.

You can generally cut things like padding, including self-congratulatory prose and lists of all the in-house departments that have worked to make the product a success. Understand what information your foreign clients or partners actually need. Cut what is irrelevant.

A financial institution in France, for example, trimmed a 500-page user manual down to 230 pages with the help of an expert translator, who identified redundancies and sections that did not apply to foreign clients -- before starting the translation itself.

A firm of patent lawyers in California regularly calls in a specialist translator to review Japanese patent documents and give a quick oral summary; together lawyers and translator then determine which documents need to be fully translated. See our specialties.

Translate only relevant sections of existing documents, or produce shorter documents in your own language and have these translated.