In-House Translation vs. Outsourcing. Choose the best approach for your business

The history of translation services has deep roots in age-old times. The first well-documented examples are in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, where different nations had a lingua franca - Akkadian for diplomatic communication. The scribes were like "outsourcers," competently translating texts and acting as translations of documents and letters for the aristocracy.

Regarding "in-house" translators, we can also find examples from old-age times. One of them is the "House of Wisdom" in Baghdad, which existed during the Golden Age of the Abbasid Caliphate. Thereat, hired by rulers, the best translators from different countries worked on Greek, Syrian, Persian, Indian, etc. authors and translated them into Arabic.

Translation services are much more available today than centuries ago, but the two main cooperation models — outsourcing and in-house — still have adherents. This article was created to overview the pros and cons of each approach and simplify the choice for those looking for translation services. Scroll down and choose the best for you.

Outsource translation vs in-house translation

To prevent any misunderstanding, we shortly described the meanings of each solution:

• Outsourcing — transferring tasks to third-party contractors or companies, like hiring external translators/translating companies to work only during the project.
• In-house — execution of translation tasks by the hired full-time employees.

And let's take a deep look at the advantages and weaknesses of each approach.

Top 3 outsource translation pros and cons

Pros

• Time-saving. With outsourcing translation services, customers can start the translation process much faster and efficiently handle even big projects by distributing work among multiple translators/teams.
• Access to specific skills. For different tasks, clients can select the translating team/company with particular knowledge in the needed field. This situation often occurs in the medical, financial, and other sensitive industries.
• Simplified scalability and money-saving. With outsourcing, there is no need to pay a fixed price. Clients can scale up or down based on the volume of the current tasks and pay only for work done instead of a fixed salary for an in-house team.

Cons

• Less control and quality issues. With outsourcing, the business can't control the translation process as deeply as it wants, which may lead to quality issues, especially when important nuances aren't checked and considered at the start of the translation process. Also, changes in the translation team (for example, when process scale and new translators are invited) can imply the quality.
• Confidentiality concerns. Sharing sensitive information with a third party is always an additional risk to company security.
• Maintenance of consistency. External translators are not part of the company and may not fully understand the business voice and culture, which can lead to a mismatch.

Top 3 in-house translation pros and cons

Pros

• Faster communication and comprehensive control. Working with internal translators means they are available during your company's working hours, and their work is fully transparent and controlled by the lead. Need a fast response or changes to be implemented? This is much easier when your translators are working for you.
• Stable and rising quality. You get a consistent quality level when you hire translators that meet the brand's standards. Additionally, your employees constantly develop their skills and adapt to the company's requirements, improving their results daily.
• Deep product knowledge. As a part of your team, the in-house translators are present in everyday company life, which means they understand even minor nuances of the company culture and processes, allowing them to provide quality results.

Cons

• Higher cost. When hiring an in-house translator, you need to budget the expenses for HR work, the adaptation efforts and time, providing workspace, etc.
• Recruitment challenge. Sometimes, finding a best-fit expert can take weeks and months. Your team will spend time on the test task checking, interviewing, etc.
• Resource allocation and limited scalability. Building a translating team includes creating an independent entity in your company with its processes and management. This process also involves spending on training and support resources. After all efforts, such a team can cover only a limited volume of tasks in specific fields and cannot scale instantly.

In conclusion, for all the above, we can state that outsourcing translation services is the best option for businesses with an unstable load for translators who often require knowledge from different and specific fields. The in-house translation approach is best for companies with constant tasks looking for profound control over the process.

Whatever you choose, one thing remains unchanged — you need a place to store all your translated content and documentation, like a style guide and glossary. This software should allow you to track progress and work with translation files if you have an in-house team or want to add a minor edit without paying extra for outsourced services.

How can TMS (translation management system) support while working with outsourcing translation services?

When outsourcing translation, companies often ignore the need to create an internal process. It is common when the translation files are stored on drives, and the team responsible for the translation or localization is constantly overloaded with manual tasks. The typical content processing can, in this case, include constant back-and-forth of the files (between outsourcing provider, developers, and managers) and manual checking of the issues, tracking the progress manually in the tables, and a lot, really a lot of time spent just on organizing more or less transparent procedures.

Understanding all these challenges, the Lingohub team designed a solution that allows businesses the following:

• Collect all data for translation in one hub. Lingohub has no limits for project numbers and supports over 40+ file formats. Companies can organize and divide all the content into different projects and project groups for convenient management and to have all data in a single place.
• Prevent errors with file structure. Lingohub allows the automatic import/export of files by synchronizing with repositories and applications. When you need to send content to an external team, you can export it in the XLIFF format, which does

• Reduce the manual checks. The automated quality checks feature by Lingohub tracks a number of criteria like terms usage, text length, spacing, HTML markup, placeholder correctness, etc. Thus, the manager responsible for translation can focus on the essential things rather than looking for minor misspellings.
• Comprehensive progress tracking. At first sight, the progress overview dashboard provides well-structured information about each aspect — the translated, in progress, new text segments, percentage of progress per language, number of segments with quality issues, etc. Thus, there is no need for manual progress updating, and you can be sure that nothing is missed.

How can TMS (translation management system) support while working with in-house translators?

The advantages described in the previous paragraph can be fully used by businesses with in-house translating teams. Additionally, Lingohub has "shticks" that simplify collaboration, work tracking, and translating process, namely:

• Automatically work and cost reports. Tracking the efforts and progress of each employee allows for more precise ahead planning and better resource allocation. Lingohub provides the work report with the summary per each translator and the ability to generate the cost reports that consider the translator's efforts and the number of words that were translated. Thus, cooperation is always fair and transparent.

• CAT tools for translators. Helpful suggestions from machine translation (based on the style guide), translation memory, glossary, and quality checks speed up the process without quality loss. Additionally, translators get extra context with UI screenshots or text segment descriptions. Altogether, these features build an environment where translators can work without unnecessary distractions (for example, to find the needed term in the glossary) and get comprehensive information about the project just during their work.
• Instant pre-translation for simplifying and accelerating. Have you known that feeling when a word tips off the tongue, but you can't remember it? The pre-translation tool avoids such situations for your translators as it provides the content based on the machine translation or translation memory results. In this case, your team can only proofread results already filled out to improve them instead of starting from scratch.

Advanced security with custom permissions. Data security is one of the most important things for businesses, especially when the team is extensive and constantly growing. The custom roles allow Lingohub customers to create unique permissions and provide access to specific projects or only their parts if needed.

To sum up

When choosing between outsourcing translation or an in-house translation team, starting with business needs and resources is essential. Both options have strengths and weaknesses, but they have one thing in common — a need for a management solution that will save time without sacrificing quality.

One such solution is the Lingohub translation management platform, which is designed to automate all translation and localization processes regardless of the approach you prefer when collaborating with translators. Try how it can work with the free 14-day trial (no credit card required), or book a demo call with our team, where we will guide you through Lingohub abilities and describe the best solutions and use cases for your individual requirements. Start right now, and let's go global together.