What is a Language Pair and Why Should You Care?

What is a language pair?

When you are translating content for your global markets, you are sure to come across the concept of language pairs. You can think of a language pair as the fundamental building block of the translation process.

But, what does it really mean if a provider "supports" a language pair?

Does it matter which language pairs provider lists on its website?

And how do you choose your language pairs?

With a firm understanding of language pairs, you can make better decisions about which languages you need to translate your content into.

Let's look at this core concept in translation…

A language pair is an identifier that describes a combination of two languages as used in the translation process. It defines the specific variants of both the source language and the target language. For example, "U.S. English > Mexican Spanish" is a language pair.

To be useful, a language pair should contain these features:

The correct formulation is simple: Source language variant to target language variant.

Remember, it's helpful to include the market as well as the language. This helps if multiple countries use the same language.

For example, "U.S. English > Simplified Chinese for Singapore"

Why is it important to know your precise language pairs when you are working with translations?

It avoids confusion and costly rework.

The language pair helps your translation provider to source and manage appropriate translators for your needs.

A good translation provider will always ask you for the specifics of your languages before they start doing any translation work for you. For example, if you send us a request for a quote, we always ask a series of questions so that we fully understand which precise language pairs make the most sense for you.

Not all translation providers will ask for these specifics.

Some providers will just send your content to any available translator for a particular language pair. For example, if you just specify "Portuguese" your content might be sent to a translator in Portugal, even though your target market is Brazil. As the provider didn't check this with you, the content ends up being unsuitable. This means you have to pay to rework the translations for the Brazilian market or the content won't work as intended.

You might see some translation providers specifying a long list of the language pairs they support.

Is such a list helpful? It depends.

For simple, one-off translation jobs with a small provider, maybe. A language pairs list can be a quick way for you to assess if the company can meet the most basic requirement to translate your content.

However, when you are managing higher volumes of content on a long-term basis, a language pairs list is less helpful.

Such a list doesn't give you enough information to tell if the provider can actually meet your translation needs long into the future. If they can't, you'll soon find yourself looking for a new translation provider to supplement the translation work for that particular language pair.

If a translation provider claims to "support a language pair," one problem is that this doesn't help you judge that provider's capacity.

Yes, they might list that they can translate from American English to Tagalog… but what quantity of content can they handle for this language pair? How consistently can they produce translations at this capacity? What is the turnaround time? What other factors will affect translation delivery?

Supporting a language pair merely shows that the provider has at least one translator for a particular pair (or maybe not even that).

But, do they have the capability to scale their capacity in that language with your company's growth? Often, the answer is no.

That's why it's usually much better to inquire directly and ask more questions.

Instead of just asking about a particular language pair, you can ask further questions about the provider's capacity. You can also share more details about your company's international markets and strategic goals.

Also, other factors affect the suitability of a translator than just knowledge of the target language or market. Domain-specific knowledge for your industry is often helpful or even required.

At Rubric, we specialize in helping companies who want to grow internationally with their translated content.

To achieve your desired global growth, you need to pick language pairs that will help you to reach the customers you want to attract efficiently.

For example, many of our clients operate in South America. There are various variants of Spanish spoken in this part of the world. Translating to all of these variants separately may be costly and is not always necessary.

We have recently been working with one client to combine their U.S. English translations for this region into Standard Latin American Spanish. This might not work for all companies, products, and markets. But for this particular client, it is the most efficient way to achieve their global goals.

At the simplest level, a language pair is just a way to describe the two languages in a particular translation process. But, working more strategically with language pairs can be a way to improve the efficiency of your translation and achieve better results.

In our guide 33 Content Translation Hacks to Simplify Your Life you will learn a selection of changes you can make to get more from your translation.