I work in the pharmaceutical industry: How can I reduce my translation costs?
Tell us what the translation is for, if not obvious from the context. Do you want a literal translation of the original for information purposes, or do you want a piece of native-speaker English for consumption by American physicians?
If your text is an electronic file, and you want the same presentation in the translation, ensure that your document is formatted using basic word-processing commands (Page Setup, Styles, Paragraph Keep With Next, Bullets & Numbering, Table of Contents etc). This avoids the translator having to spend a couple of hours at your expense reformatting your document before he or she can work within it.
Strike out/clearly mark sections that do not require translating, e.g. small-print headers and footers, numerical tabular material, literature references and passages of duplicate text.
Tell us what the translation is for, if not obvious from the context. Do you want a literal translation of the original for information purposes, or do you want a piece of native-speaker English for consumption by American physicians?
This will save the translator time in settling on a style, and provide you with a more appropriate product.
If the text for translation is a paper targeted at a specific journal, read through our answers to Q1.