Acclaro.com

Starting our Acclaro review

Our visitors asked us to review Acclaro Inc., and since we’ve never heard about it before, we were eager to get started. The first thing we did to provide a trusted Acclaro review was look into its background. We found out that Acclaro was founded in 2002, and since then, it has quickly grown into a large entity with offices all over the world. It has established a physical presence in Boston, San Francisco, New York, Thailand, and Japan. They claim that it also has offices in Argentina, France, and England, but we found only email addresses, so we can’t confirm it. Headquartered in the United States, Acclaro provides services in 125 languages, but this was the extent of available information. We examined Acclaro reviews written by other clients and saw that they are mixed. Company’s website is very vague, too. While it has been operating for 18 years, it offers no information on language pairs it covers, number of employees it has, and specifics of services it provides. We didn’t understand this, and our confusion only kept intensifying. Accaro claims that it’s housing veteran translators with years of experience in the translation industry, but no details are offered. After this, we placed our own order for our own review, wondering what translation we will get.

Services Acclaro Offers

Acclaro provides a whole bunch of services, and they are as diverse as we expected. Company is large, and so it provides translation, localization, transcription, subtitling, voice recordings, retiming, animation, etc. In addition, Acclaro offers an interpretation along with Android and iOS-based mobile application assistance. Its software translation service supports various file types, and it’s ready to assist you with adaptation of your content for markets in different parts of the world. Agency has an automated translation API that helps developers speed up localization, synchronizing it with other development processes, and helping you meet deadlines sooner. This agency also has a Content Management System that allows clients to integrate their website content faster. Its employees could optimize it for all international website audits.

In terms of audiovisual service, Acclaro.com produces video content for educational, e-learning, and training purposes. With the help of its in-house video production team, it keeps all projects harmonized. These same professionals then work together to translate produced videos for audiences in diverse regions. Company uses such post-production tools as Avid Media Composer, SmartBuilder, and iSpring to keep content up to clients’ standards.

Acclaro’s interpretation services include on-site and over-the-phone interpretation, with the latter comprising simultaneous and consecutive speech translation during meetings or other important events. Overall, we were impressed. Despite the fact that not much info is available, the agency makes up for it by providing all possible services one could expect from a firm like this. Its 125 supported languages also present an impressive number — we only wish we could see just what language pairs these people work with.

Prices and Add-ons

Before writing a review, our team investigated rates. Accaro’s website doesn’t include a pricing list for its services. This is an instant red flag for us. In our experience, only companies with very high prices do this sort of thing. We believe it’s disrespectful toward clients because they should waste their time on ordering a quotation and filling in an order form.

Several factors affect translating rates, and we usually base our opinions on the market average. Our rate was $0.15 for one word, which is a high price, considering that our deadline was long enough. Now, our impression was dependent on quality of translated material.

Quality of Acclaro translation

Our document fell into the financial sphere. We wanted to see how experts will cope with special terms and concepts, as well as formulas. The target language we chose was Japanese. When our order arrived (which happened right by the deadline), we sent it for a professional analysis to our Japanese expert. Her opinion wasn’t positive. Translation had many serious errors along with mistranslations. Some definitions were mixed, likely because they sounded similar. Also, formatting was way off, which really annoyed us. Okay, so our order was assigned to a bad specialist, but making sure formatting looks all right is a basic thing anyone can do. The fact that Acclaro Inc. didn’t bother with it really frustrated us.

We sent a complaint together with a revision request. People we spoke to were polite, professional, and they accepted our claim. A few days later, translation was revised. To our disappointment, it remained very flawed. Some mistakes were corrected only to be replaced with new ones. Formatting was finally fixed, but at this point, it didn’t help matters.

Pros and Cons

Would you like to know the best and the worst sides of this service? After our thorough review our team came up with a list

Pros

• Long professional history. With 18 years of operations, Acclaro team comprises experienced managers.
• Solid technology base. Company has a translation API that can accelerate execution of clients’ projects. Acclaro software is diverse and flexible, too, which is definitely a plus.
• Many services provided. Find assistance for document, website, marketing, multimedia translation, software localization, or even interpretation.
• Good communication. Our requests were always handled in a polite manner.

Cons

• Site’s design is too heavy-handed. It feels overwhelming with the number of colorful pictures placed one on top of the other.
• No details about prices & qualifications offered. You won’t know how much you’ll be spending or who your translator is.
• Low quality. Document translation services didn’t correspond to acceptable standards.
• Ineffective revisions. QC team should be extra attentive to files that have been sent back for revision. Ours remained flawed despite our detailed complaints, which means lack of proper control that should be established.

Summary

As you have seen from our Acclaro review, this company doesn’t have a proper understanding of what professional translation services should entail, which is surprising since it’s been working for many years. The fact that clients should contact company to get the right rates for their projects is bothersome. Revision option does not function properly. In addition, it was not unclear what kind of qualifications the firm’s translators hold. For all these reasons, we cannot call Acclaro the best translation services company in the market. We have no doubt that this agency worked well in the past — older reviews, which are much more positive in nature, are proof of that, but something must have happened to alter its positive performance. We are willing to review it again at some point in future if we get some evidence of it improving its performance.