Choosing a Translation Company: 12 Questions to Ask
Originally published January 26, 2016. Updated October 15, 2026, with questions for RFPs, AI use, data handling, and proposal evaluation.
Estimated Read Time: 11 minutes
Summary
Choosing a translation company starts with defining what you need and comparing how providers will deliver it. Ask about relevant experience, linguist qualifications, quality review, AI use, confidentiality, capacity, pricing, and accountability. Give every bidder the same project information and request evidence alongside its answers. For a broader language-services RFP, evaluate each service separately before deciding how to award the work.
You have several translation companies on your shortlist. Each promises quality, responsive service, and competitive pricing. How do you find out what those promises mean for your organization?
Start by asking how each company will handle your actual work. Request specific answers about the people, review steps, technology, deliverables, and costs involved. Then ask for evidence that supports those answers.
The questions below can guide a conversation or become part of a request for proposal (RFP). They focus on written translation, with additional considerations for an RFP that also includes interpreting and other language access services.
Define the Work Before Comparing Providers
A useful proposal starts with a useful brief. If one company assumes you need translated text and another includes publication-ready files, their prices will tell you very little about the difference in value.
Give prospective providers the same information:
- Source and target languages, intended audience, and regional preferences.
- Document types, subject matter, and representative files cleared for sharing.
- Expected volume, update frequency, and likely peaks in demand.
- Delivery deadlines and time needed for your own review.
- Required file formats, formatting, and accessibility work.
- Confidentiality requirements and any restrictions on tools or data locations.
- How you will review, accept, and pay for the finished work.
Separate firm requirements from preferences. Explain which volumes are estimates and which, if any, you are committing to purchase. A short project brief may be enough for a single document; an ongoing program needs more detail.
Give every provider the same scope so proposals describe comparable work.
12 Questions to Ask a Translation Company
With your project requirements in hand, use these questions to find out how each company would approach the work. Each section includes wording you can adapt for an RFP and examples of evidence to request so you can compare the answers.
1. Have You Handled Work Like Ours?
Look for experience with your subject matter, audience, languages, and deliverables. Translating a benefits application involves different challenges from adapting an advertising campaign.
A company can serve several industries successfully. What matters is how it assigns people with the right experience to your project and recognizes work outside its capabilities.
Ask in Your RFP: Describe comparable assignments, including language combinations, content types, project scale, and your role. Explain how you would apply that experience to our work.
Evidence to Request: Relevant references or authorized, redacted examples. A long client list alone does not show what the company actually delivered.
2. How Do You Qualify Translators and Reviewers?
Being bilingual is a starting point. Translation also requires strong writing, research, subject knowledge, and the ability to preserve meaning for the intended reader.
Ask how the provider evaluates those skills, checks qualifications, and monitors performance. Include reviewers and subcontractors in the question. Native-language background, residence, or years of experience should not replace evidence of ability.
The American Translators Association’s certification guide explains that ATA certification applies to a specific language pair and direction. It is not available for every combination. A certified translator and a certified translation are also different: the latter includes a statement affirming accuracy and completeness.
Ask in Your RFP: Explain your qualification criteria for translators and reviewers, including relevant credentials, assessments, subject expertise, and ongoing evaluation.
Evidence to Request: An anonymized qualification profile and an explanation of how the proposed team meets your requirements.
3. What Happens From Request Through Delivery?
Ask the company to walk you through a project using your sample files. Who identifies missing information? When is the scope approved? How are questions resolved before they delay delivery?
Your team has responsibilities, too. Supply editable source files where available, identify the approved version, and appoint someone who can answer content questions. Agree on review milestones and who authorizes release.
Ask in Your RFP: Describe your workflow from intake and quotation through production, client review, delivery, and acceptance. Identify our responsibilities and approval points.
Evidence to Request: A sample project plan showing dependencies, review time, and deliverables.
4. Who Owns Communication and Escalation?
You need to know who will answer questions and resolve problems. That may be a dedicated project manager or a documented team arrangement with reliable backup coverage.
Clarify normal service hours, response expectations, and escalation contacts. A quick acknowledgment and a completed solution are different commitments. Ask what happens when your usual contact is unavailable.
Ask in Your RFP: Identify the roles responsible for our account, project coordination, and escalation. Describe response targets, coverage hours, and backup arrangements.
Evidence to Request: A communication plan and an example of how an urgent issue would move through the escalation process.
5. What Quality Checks Are Included?
“Reviewed” can mean several things. Find out whether someone compares the full translation with the source, whether that person is different from the translator, and whether the final formatted files receive another check.
Bilingual revision checks meaning and completeness against the original. Proofreading checks language mechanics and consistency. A post-layout check looks for problems introduced during production, such as missing text or incorrect line breaks. Define the work instead of relying on labels alone.
For an example of how these stages fit together, see our translation, editing, and proofreading process.
Ask in Your RFP: Identify each quality-control step, who performs it, what it covers, and the criteria used to accept the work. Explain how the approach changes with content risk.
Evidence to Request: A review checklist and a redacted issue report. If the provider claims certification to a standard, request the certificate, scope, issuer, and validity dates.
ISO 17100 addresses translation-service processes and resources. Its scope excludes interpreting and raw machine-translation output followed by post-editing. A reference to that standard should therefore be checked against the service being proposed.
Confirm what each review stage checks and who is responsible for it.
6. Will You Use Machine Translation or Generative AI?
Ask this directly, even when the proposal emphasizes human expertise. Find out which tools may process your content, whether you must approve their use, and what human review follows.
The NIST Generative AI Profile identifies risks including confidently presented false content and data privacy problems. For buyers, this supports a practical question: how will the provider verify the output and control what happens to the input?
Ask in Your RFP: Disclose proposed machine translation or generative AI use, approval controls, data-use terms, and human review. Explain when you would reject an automated draft and translate from the source instead.
Evidence to Request: A workflow specifying whether a qualified linguist checks the entire translation against the original, whether separate review follows, and how tool changes are approved.
Our AI-assisted language services overview explains possible approaches. The appropriate choice depends on your content and intended use.
7. How Will You Protect Our Information?
A confidentiality agreement is useful, but it does not explain the full handling process. Ask where files travel, who can access them, and how long copies remain in production systems, backups, and third-party tools.
Identify your organization’s requirements before sharing sensitive samples. The same questions should cover employees, freelancers, subcontractors, and technology vendors.
Ask in Your RFP: Describe access controls, secure transfer, storage and processing locations, retention and deletion, subcontractor obligations, and incident notification. State whether our content may be retained or used to train models.
Evidence to Request: Relevant policies and contractual commitments, reviewed against your security requirements. Ask the provider to identify exceptions explicitly rather than responding only “compliant.”
8. How Will You Maintain Consistency and Handle Our Files?
A translation memory stores source-text segments with their translations for possible reuse. A glossary records approved terms. A style guide addresses preferences such as tone and formatting. They serve different purposes, and someone needs to maintain them.
Clarify ownership, access, export formats, fees, and handover arrangements. Also ask how the company prevents outdated translations from being reused without checking their context.
Ask in Your RFP: Explain how you maintain terminology and translation assets, support our file formats, and deliver editable files. Describe ownership and export arrangements during and after the contract.
Evidence to Request: Sample deliverable formats and a written handover plan. If document accessibility is included, specify the target standard, testing, and reporting for each language version; translation and visual formatting alone do not establish accessibility.
9. Can You Support Our Volume and Deadlines?
Ask about the languages and work you actually expect, including unusual combinations, recurring updates, and busy periods. Overall company size tells you less than a realistic staffing and delivery plan.
Distinguish a routine turnaround target from a commitment made after reviewing files. Include time for terminology questions, your approvals, formatting, and final checks.
Ask in Your RFP: Explain capacity for our expected workload, lead-time assumptions, surge coverage, and contingency arrangements. Identify work you cannot reliably support.
Evidence to Request: A schedule for a representative assignment and a plan for a missed milestone or unavailable linguist. Ask how additional staff will be briefed to preserve consistency.
10. What Does the Price Include?
Compare the cost of the finished deliverable. A per-word rate may exclude review, formatting, project management, or accessibility work.
Ask whether billing uses source or target words, how repetitions and translation-memory matches are priced, and when minimums or rush charges apply. For ongoing contracts, clarify rate-review terms and invoice detail.
Ask in Your RFP: Provide itemized pricing, assumptions, exclusions, minimum charges, and conditions that could change the total. Price the representative scenarios supplied with this RFP.
Evidence to Request: A completed pricing schedule and sample invoice. Our guide to translation pricing explains the main models and comparison questions.
A lower quote deserves clarification. It does not, by itself, establish lower quality or a misunderstanding of the scope.
11. How Do You Handle Changes and Problems?
Separate a correction to work that missed the agreed requirements from a new request or a preference introduced after approval. Those situations can have different cost and scheduling consequences.
Agree on how feedback is submitted and resolved. Your internal reviewer should identify the passage, explain the concern, and distinguish an error from a wording preference. The provider should respond with a reasoned recommendation and record approved changes.
Ask in Your RFP: Describe change authorization, correction responsibilities, feedback resolution, and any review windows or fees. Explain how you investigate recurring problems and prevent them from happening again.
Evidence to Request: A change-order example and a redacted corrective-action record. Confirm that approved corrections reach the final files and relevant translation assets.
12. What Evidence Supports Your Proposal?
References are most useful when their projects resemble yours. Ask about communication, deadline reliability, invoice accuracy, and what happened when something needed fixing.
For a substantial contract, consider a small paid pilot if your procurement process permits it. Give shortlisted providers the same brief and evaluate the results against criteria established in advance. Use qualified reviewers rather than asking an unassessed bilingual employee to judge technical accuracy alone.
Ask in Your RFP: Provide relevant references and explain how you would complete a representative pilot, including its scope, price, review process, and deliverables.
Evidence to Request: Permission to contact references and a pilot plan. Protect confidential material and avoid requesting other clients’ files without authorization.
Adapt the Questions for a Language-Services RFP
A language service company may offer several services, but translation capability does not establish interpreting capability. Translators work with written content, whereas interpreters support spoken or signed communication.
Keep common requirements, such as security and invoicing, in one section. Then create separate service schedules:
| Service | Additional Questions |
|---|---|
| On-site interpreting | Which locations and languages can you cover? How are assignments confirmed? What are the credential, travel, minimum-booking, and cancellation terms? |
| Video and phone interpreting | What is scheduled versus on demand? Which languages and hours are supported? How are connection times measured, and what happens if service fails? |
| Sign language interpreting | How do you assess the requested language, communication needs, interpreter qualifications, and possible team requirements? What happens when video is unsuitable? |
| CART and captioning | Is the service human-produced or automated? How are accuracy, delay, terminology preparation, platform access, and transcripts addressed? |
| Document accessibility | Which files and language versions are included? What standards, manual checks, testing evidence, and acceptance criteria apply? |
For booking details, see how to request an interpreter.
Decide whether providers may bid on individual services or must cover the whole package. One provider can simplify coordination; separate awards may better match specialized needs. Compare both options against your organization’s workload and purchasing rules.
Compare Answers With a Consistent Scorecard
Decide how you will evaluate responses before proposals arrive. Separate mandatory requirements from scored preferences, and use the same evidence standards for every bidder. Follow your organization’s rules for clarifications, demonstrations, and reference checks.
For each scored requirement, a simple illustrative scale is:
- 0 — Not Addressed: No usable answer or evidence.
- 1 — Partly Addressed: Some relevant detail, with material gaps.
- 2 — Meets the Requirement: A clear response supported by relevant evidence.
- 3 — Adds Relevant Value: Meets the requirement and demonstrates an additional benefit your team can explain.
Set weights around your actual needs. Quality review, security, service capacity, and total cost may matter differently across assignments. Do not give extra credit for features your staff will not use.
Record the reason for each score and any unresolved exception. Before award, carry the agreed scope, prices, service targets, acceptance criteria, and responsibilities into the contract. A helpful proposal answer is much less useful if it never becomes an agreed commitment.
Apply the same scoring definitions and evidence requirements to every proposal.
Choose a Provider You Can Work With
The most useful answers explain what will happen on your project, who will be responsible, and how you will know the work meets your requirements.
You do not need to ask every possible question. Start with the ones that could change your decision, request evidence, and resolve important gaps before work begins. That gives your team a practical basis for choosing a provider and managing the relationship afterward.
If you have questions about scoping translation services or are ready to discuss a project, contact NWI Global. Share your languages, audience, sample files, and delivery needs so we can talk through the next steps.