Scenario 2

Mr. Hafiz owns an architectural firm. His firm had recently been invited to bid for a large construction project in Brazil. Upon receiving the tender documentation, he found that all the documents were in Portuguese. Mr. Hafiz needed to understand the tender documentation in order to prepare his bid, which had to be in Portuguese as well.

Mr. Hafiz contacted a translation agency. The agency quoted him RM8,000 to translate the tender documentation consisting of about 50 pages from Portuguese to English using human translation. The agency then quoted him RM16,000 to translate his bidding documentation (about 100 pages) from English to Portuguese. This brought his cost to RM24,000.

Mr. Hafiz then contacted us. We had a discussion with Mr. Hafiz about the criteria for the translation and suggested that he use machine translation for the tender documentation as he only needed to understand the content and subsequently, we would use a human translator for the bidding document. We quoted Mr. Hafiz RM500 for the machine translation and RM16,000 (maximum price as we also leveraged on Translation Memory for the translation) for the human translation of the bidding document. This brought his cost to RM16,500 or less depending on the results of the Translation Memory matches. Again, this represented a substantial savings for Mr. Hafiz.