Right!
You need to translate your website for your potential customers overseas. There are basically 2 ways to get a good translation that will do what you need:
1) You speak some English, so you try to do it yourself. It’s a struggle. After a couple of hours wrestling with the dictionary, you give up.
Then you get Anna, your secretary, to do it. She studied English at school, so she’s bound to do a decent job. She struggles. She can’t perform her normal duties while she’s attempting to do the translation.
You tell her to give up, and you resort to Google Translate. You can see that it’s unusable, so you bin it.
Your nephew Leo once spent a summer waiting tables in London, so you get him to do it; he’s bound to do a decent job, and you don’t have to pay him, either. He struggles. But he doesn’t want to disappoint you, so he tries for several weeks (during which you still don’t have an English website) and eventually comes up with something.
Problem solved, you put Leo’s translation on your website. After a while, you examine your stats and wonder why 99% of the site visitors leave after 6 seconds.
Someone posts a comment that the translations are rubbish. You think nothing of it.
The next week, you meet your friend Emma for coffee, and you proudly show her your new English website. She tells you that the translations are rubbish.
Worried, you look for a professional translator, but they must be the cheapest one, because translators are all the same (aren’t they?). The cheap translator delivers the texts suspiciously quickly, and you pay his bill.
Emma looks at the translations and tells you they’re still not very good.
Exasperated, you look for an excellent professional translator, a native speaker with qualifications and impressive experience, and you choose me. You pay for the translations a second time, but this time they are done properly. You put the translations on your website and feel relieved and genuinely proud that, at last, your business has a worthy, incisive English voice. Your website stats improve, too.
Emma, who by now is following the saga with interest and more than a hint of wry humour, tells you that the translations are great.
You wonder why you didn’t come to me first.
2) You come to me first…