If you are running a small company and looking at translating texts, but also keen on keeping costs to a minimum, consider the following scenario.

• You have a text that needs to be translated into English, you yourself or an employee in your company already has some English, but written English can be a problem.

• I suggest the following. Purchase a translation program which is especially designed for websites. Now, you may remember me saying on the introduction page that these programs do not offer the best results. This is where the human factor plays a role.

• The program will translate your text. The result, however, may not exactly be what you had hoped for. The word order in the text or the meaning may be mixed up or lost respectively.

• Next step: Clear up incomprehensible parts of the text yourself, here's where your English knowledge, or that of one of your other employees, comes into fruition. Now, bear with me, hire a native-speaker, at best a student (they are cheap, sometimes free if you offer them an internship) to review and clean-up your text. And that's it! Not convinced....

• I judge that sending any length of text to a freelance translator will take at least twice as long as a trained employee who is familiar with the texts and the functionality of the translation program and whose task it is to merely check over the text for accuracy and grammar. You should, of course, make sure your student/apprentice has the proper credentials.