Absolute Translations Reviews by Trusted Experts

Our readers started to send us requests to do Absolute Translations reviews. To do it, we analyzed all their feedback online, their website, prices, speed, and quality of translation. Absolute Translations was founded back in 2001 in the UK. This company has plenty of certifications such as ISO and ATC, so it looks reputable. They serve both small and large companies such as HP, BBC, and Microsoft. As for reviews, they have 95% positive feedback, which is impressive. Their main service is localization and they state that they never use machines for documents. At first sight, this company looks really good and has a strong 20-year history of success and growth. 

Services Offered at AbsoluteTranslations.com

Absolute Translation offers many services to its clients. Here is a short overview of all:

• Translation. Absolute offers services for official documents using translation memory that makes results more accurate. They work both with small businesses and private individuals.

• Website localization. Absolute Language Translation offers pay per click services and SEO. Also, they work with social media like Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin. They also deal with company websites and adjust them to fit target audiences. 

• Interpreting. Absolute is a certified interpreting company that can work at medical appointments, business conferences, and court hearings. They also can interpret via telephone.

• Audio transcription. Absolute reviews showed that it is certified to transcribe audios. They charge per minute of recording and can deal with many dialects and difficult audio.

• Subtitling. You can order audiovisual and subtitling for any media including presentations, movie releases, broadcasts, etc.

• Voice-over. A company has many male and female voice artists to prepare a voice-over for your video or game.

• Proofreading. Absolute offers to proofread any text and can polish it, ensure consistency, and verify terminology.

• Desktop publishing. AbsoluteTranslations.com specialists in typesetting and design can prepare your publication in more than 200 language pairs. They can offer many fonts and designs.

• Industries. The service has specialists in many spheres of knowledge. At the moment, they can handle business, financial, government, IT, medical, legal, marketing, and technical industries.

For our reviews, we decided to test website localization. Absolute is proud of its best English to Chinese translation service, so we decided to choose this language pair. When you localize, you change some parts of the original text to make it more native-like. With websites, you often change details of interface, layout, button size, pictures, and of course, our text. Localization often changes local idioms for target ones, paraphrases sentences, and makes the text more native-friendly. This is one of the most popular types of documents today, so we wanted to see how Absolute handles it.

Prices and Add Ons

Absolute Translations Ltd. doesn’t have a price list on their website. Still, you can get to know the rates of your order using an instant price quote. All you have to do is enter source and target languages, word count, your name, and email. After this, a website will show you all the pricing options you can choose. We opted for a webpage that had 1,050 words from English to Chinese. Here are the options we got:

1. Standard. The document is proofread and done by an expert. Absolute promises to deliver documents in 1 to 2 working days, for $0.14 per word.

2. Standard & Proofreading. If you choose this variant, your professional translation gets double proofreading by an independent expert. This option costs $0.18 per word.

3. Specialist. Absolute will match an industry specialist to complete your document. Such service is $0.17 per one word.

4. Specialist & Proofreading. This is the priciest option at $0.21 per word. This type of translation is best when you need professional business translation of documents.  You get a linguist who is a specialist in your industry. After they complete your order, you get proofreading by a second independent translator.

For our order, we decided to go for standard translation with proofreading. This allows us to test the average quality of this company. Our order cost $192 overall which is rather expensive, at least it’s higher than the marketing average. 

Service Quality

According to customer reviews, Absolute provides excellent service. They describe it as fast and effective. They complete translations in several days, and support members are polite. Still, they make mistakes in some cases. Customers who used their certified Spanish translation services say that there were some errors in dates. Absolute corrected the document immediately, which is good. In the end, nobody is safe from making mistakes. But other customers state that the wrong document translation got them into trouble with the law, which is unacceptable. Also, many customers complain that the prices are too high. Overall, we can conclude that their quality is inconsistent.

Our Order

First of all, we received our translation within two days which is great. We were even surprised that the difficult localization took such a short time. After this, we gave our AbsoluteTranslations review document to a Chinese expert who would estimate it. To our regret, they weren’t satisfied with the quality. The file had several basic mistakes that were obvious for a native. This is surprising because we ordered proofreading services, so we were sure that two specialists would not miss them. 

Also, we noticed mistakes in the product names - they didn’t sound good in Chinese. In fact, some word combinations with the product now sounded funny and unprofessional for a native. If we planned to conquer Chinese audiences with such a page, it would be a flop. That said, the biggest part of the translation was fine. We wrote to AbsoluteTranslations to discuss this problem and they quickly changed the product name for a more acceptable one. Still, we left with an impression that the proofreading specialists at AbsoluteTranslations weren’t attentive.

Pros & Cons

Here is a quick overview of the pros & cons of Absolute. Like many other companies, they have stronger as well as weaker sides.

Pros:

• Great Absolute reviews from customers

• Pricing options

• Fast delivery

• Revision on demand

Cons: 

• Pricey service

• Localization with mistakes

• Insufficient proofreading

Summary of Our Absolute Translations Review

At first sight, Absolute looks like a reputable company that cares about its staff, customers, and even the environment. They have many languages and many pricing options to fit every budget. But in the end, you pay pretty much for localization services. If you choose the least pricey option, you might end up with mistakes. Customers of Absolute Trans often complain that the company makes mistakes in vital documents, such as birth certificates. This is not good for such a large company, because such papers might lead to problems with the law. 

During our reviews, we saw that the company has great speed and a nice, helpful support team. They can help you if you find any mistakes. Still, we were disappointed, because we paid for proofreading to avoid these mistakes. If we didn’t have our online translation services expert, we would end up with erroneous localization. When you pay $0.18 a word, you don’t want to find mistakes in your product name. We would not recommend using Absolute Translations for certified documents and localization. From what we saw, other types of translation might turn out fine, but we wouldn’t risk localizing there if you don’t know the target language.