Scenario 3

Mr. Tan owns a real estate agency. Recently his team concluded a sale of a building in Japan. One of the requirements for the sale was that all the design specifications and safety manuals had to be given to the new client is English. They were all in Japanese and there were almost 2000 pages and they needed the translation back in roughly 7 working days. After consulting with another agency who quoted him RM100,000 for human translation, Mr Tan contacted us. After further discussion about the criteria for the delivery of the documents, we advised him to use machine translation with minor editing as this was the only way to complete such a large quantity of documents within the required time frame. We quoted him RM20,000 for this job. We completed the translation within the given timeframe and Mr. Tan managed to submit all the relevant documents to his client.

Mr. Tan owns an agency catering mainly to applicants for the MM2H scheme in Malaysia. He currently has a client that is applying for MM2H status. Part of the application process is the submission of civil status and banking documents for the client and his family. These documents must be submitted to the Immigration department and as such, they need to be certified accordingly. The client is of Russian nationality and all his documents are in Russian. There is a significant number of banking documents and other civil status documents.

Mr. Tan contacts agency AB and they quote Mr. Tan RM3,600 to translate about 20 pages or RM180 per page. Mr. Tan then contact another agency, LS Agency and after looking over the documents, they suggest using machine translation + editing for the banking documents as the content is quite straight forward and repetitive. For the civil status, they will use human translators + translation memory to reduce the cost. As these are banking documents and civil status documents, there is a significant amount of page formatting to do as well. LS Agency quotes Mr. Tan RM2000 for the 20 pages. The breakdown of which is RM400 for MT, RM700 for the editing, RM300 for the page formatting and RM600 for the certification.