Fortunately, by adopting a broader perspective on the translation process, companies can not only avoid many of these pitfalls but can actually leverage their translated documentation into a source of competitive advantage, rather than just another cost of doing business. These are the costs most commonly associated with the translation process, but they are far from complete. Opportunity Costs . Opportunity costs are defined as the value of a foregone alternative. For example, if, due to limited resources, a company chooses to market to Spain versus Denmark, then the opportunity cost of selling in Spain is the potential value of the Danish market.
Informed choices demand a thorough understanding of opportunity costs.
Once a company has identified its hidden opportunity costs, it can begin to investigate how they relate to strategic translation decisions. For a company newly embarked on a translation program, a reasonable first step might be to solicit estimates on its existing materials. However, as we learned from the above analysis, such a conclusion is inaccurate since it does not take into consideration the more important opportunity costs. In fact, it was not written by a documentation specialist at all. The length of the material has a direct impact on the cost of translation.