On paper, one language company's quote looks like any other: a rate, a turnaround time, the languages you need, and the total at the bottom. That does not mean that all language companies are the same, or that you should make your decision based on price or company size alone. Whether to a patient trying to manage their health or to a claimant trying to make sense of an insurance policy, words matter. The language provider you choose makes a real difference in your customers’ experience with your organization. In critical situations, it can impact their health and well-being, too.
The real differences between companies are the ones you may not think to ask about, like whether a second linguist reviews every translation, or whether translators and interpreters work from a shared glossary and style guide that keep your terminology consistent.
These differences may not show up in a quote. Yet once you know what to look for, you can see them before you sign, instead of after something goes wrong.
1. Start With the Linguists
Translation and interpreting quality begins with the linguist the company assigns to your project. A good company chooses translators who are native speakers of the target language, trained in the craft, and experienced in your subject. It holds interpreters to the same standard and asks more of them still, because an interpreter has to render meaning accurately in real time, under pressure, with no chance to go back and fix a phrase. A linguist who knows civil engineering, or Medicaid notices, or insurance vocabulary will do a better job, because every field has its own vocabulary.
Training is not a formality. It changes what the patient actually hears or reads. The research bears this out. When investigators recorded interpreted visits in two pediatric emergency departments, they found that
professional medical interpreters made errors with possible clinical consequences 12 percent of the time, while family members and other untrained interpreters did so 22 percent of the time. Among the professionals with 100 hours of training or more, the figure
dropped to 2 percent.
Ask any company you are considering how it recruits and tests its linguists, and how it decides whom to place on your account. The good ones will describe a real process: subject-matter tests, sample assignments, and a way to remove a linguist who does not measure up.
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2. Ask How They Control Quality
No translator, however careful, catches every slip in his or her own work. That is why a second qualified linguist should read the finished translation against the original and confirm that the meaning, the terminology, and the details all came through intact. This second reading is the heart of
ISO 17100, the international standard for translation, which calls for it on every project and sets the qualifications that the translator and the reviser must both meet.
Watch how a company describes that step. A proofread and an edit are not the same thing, though some companies use the words as if they were. A proofreader corrects spelling, grammar, and punctuation in the translation alone, while an editor reads the original and the translation together and confirms that the meaning came across. When you talk with a company, ask who performs that second reading and what qualifies them to do it. If the same translator is the only person who ever reviews the translation, you are paying for a single set of eyes.
Interpreting cannot be checked the same way, because it happens live, with no draft to fix. Quality control there means qualified and certified interpreters, a briefing before high-stakes assignments, and monitoring and feedback once the encounter is over. Ask how a company verifies the skills of the interpreters they use, how they monitor interpreting sessions, and what happens when a session goes wrong.
3. Ask How They Use Technology
When it comes to language, technology cuts both ways. Used well, it can put more translated content in front of the people who need it, faster and at a lower cost than ever, and help you maintain consistent terminology. Used carelessly, it can cost you the very quality you were paying for.
A glossary and a translation memory are useful tools that keep your terminology consistent and speed up translation. A glossary is the agreed list of your preferred terms, so that a word like "member" or a specific drug name is translated the same way every time. A translation memory stores your approved translations and reuses them, which keeps wording steady across documents and languages and lowers the costs of translating standardized or repetitive content. Ideally, you should look for a company that both uses and maintains these resources.
Machine translation, which is a form of AI, is the source of both the speed and the risk. Most language companies offer it to clients who need a faster, lower-cost alternative to human translation. It can help you translate more words for less. When it gets something wrong, though, you are the one who has to answer to the person who relied on it, not the machine. So the real questions are whether a qualified human reviews the output, and whether the company will tell you plainly when AI has been part of the process.
Human review is called post-editing, and it has a standard of its own. ISO 18587 sets out what a post-editor must be able to do, and it separates a full edit, which brings the output up to human quality, from a light one, which repairs only the worst errors. The level you need depends on what is at stake. A hospital can reasonably run an internal newsletter through machine translation with a light edit. A discharge instruction is a different matter, and a qualified editor should bring it fully to human quality before any patient reads it.
The same caution applies to interpreting. Automated interpreting apps are improving, and they have their place when little is at stake, but in a medical, legal, or financial encounter, a qualified human interpreter is still the only one who can catch a misunderstanding as it happens and set it right on the spot.
4. Verify the Certifications
A certification tells you that a company has committed to a standard and passed an outside audit. Some companies call themselves ISO-compliant, or say they follow ISO standards, with no certificate from an accredited body to show for it. No certificate means no audit, which means no one is actually checking to make sure their procedures follow those standards. Ask to see the certificate.
Then make sure the credential suits the setting. For
medical interpreting, look for certification from the Certification Commission for Healthcare Interpreters (CCHI) or the National Board of Certification for Medical Interpreters (NBCMI). American Sign Language has a credential of its own, granted by the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf (RID), the only national ASL-English certification. For a courtroom, confirm that the interpreter holds the right state or federal certification.
5. Confirm Your Information Stays Protected
Material sent for translation often includes confidential details: medical records, claims files, unpublished research, financial statements. A responsible language company will tell you clearly how it keeps those details safe. Every linguist on your account should sign a confidentiality agreement, and the company should limit access to your files to the people who truly need it. When the law calls for a particular agreement, a good company signs it without hesitation, whether that is a Business Associate Agreement before it handles protected health information or a GDPR Data Processing Agreement for work that involves residents of the European Union.
The same general concern applies to interpreters, as well. An interpreter hears everything said in a medical or legal encounter, so a company should hold them to the same confidentiality agreements, and its telephone and video platforms should be encrypted and, where health information is involved, HIPAA-compliant.
Nowadays, confidentiality concerns are not just about humans. You should also inquire about AI use. Does the company use your material to train AI systems, and will it stop if you ask? Get the answer in writing and confirm that no one will feed your content into an outside model without your consent. A company that has spent years in regulated industries will describe its safeguards precisely rather than wave the question away.
6. Weigh Experience and Accountability
Two companies can hold the very same certificates and still differ in judgment, and judgment is the thing you are truly paying for. A company that has spent years on hard projects catches things a newer one would miss, such as a slogan that reads accurately and still embarrasses you in a new market, or a single term that different translators have rendered three ways across a stack of related documents.
Experience shows that a company can get the language right. Accountability shows you it will answer for the outcome. In practice, it comes down to two questions. When a question comes up late in the day, can you reach someone who knows your account by name? If something goes wrong, will the company own the mistake and set it right? The surest sign of a quality-focused partner is a roster of clients who stay for years and who take the company along when they move to a new employer. People give that loyalty to a firm they trust, and price is seldom the reason they stay.
With interpreting, accountability comes down to a simple test: when you need an interpreter on short notice, does a qualified one actually appear, on time and ready?
How Liaison Multilingual Ensures Quality
For 29 years, we have translated and interpreted for organizations that cannot afford to be misunderstood, including healthcare, insurance, law, finance, engineering, and market research. The standards above are not a wish list to us. They are how we work.
We assign only translators and interpreters trained to translate or interpret in your field, and every translator works into his or her native language. A second linguist edits every document we translate, and a project manager reviews it before it comes back to you. We keep a glossary and a translation memory for each account, so your terminology stays consistent from one project to the next. When machine translation is the right tool, we offer it, and a qualified human post-editor brings anything high-stakes up to full human quality. Every project follows the standards of ASTM F43.05, the subcommittee on Quality Assurance in Language Services, which our president, Susan Amarino, chairs.
“Every document we translate reaches a real person trying to understand something that matters to them, a diagnosis, a policy, a contract. Our work is to see that nothing important is lost before it gets to them.”
Susan Amarino, President, Liaison Multilingual
We carry WBENC and WOSB certification and ISO 17100 certification, and we belong to the American Translators Association. We interpret on site, by telephone, and by video, including American Sign Language.
If you are looking for a language partner whose care matches what is at stake for the people who depend on it, please feel free to
get in touch. We would be glad to hear about what you are working on and to talk about how we can help.
