As an exporter, you’re betting the sales and success of your product on whether this translation is quality and truly connects with your target audience.

So for those of you who find this a bit scary, here are some do’s and don’ts designed to keep you out of the dark.

1. DO: Look into the translation company you’re working with.

The surest way to guarantee a project’s success is to choose the right partner before it begins. In Canada, the Association de l’industrie de la langue (AILIA) is the overseeing body, while the American Translators’ Association (ATA) has members in both Canada and the U.S. On an international level, there’s the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA).

If a company isn’t involved in any trade bodies, take caution. This may sound more like advice on how to pick a partner than how to tell if a translation is good, but both AILIA and ATA have standards that members must follow, and if your partner is not a member, your completed project is less likely to conform to those standards.

2. DO: Look at the translated international business document you get back.

Is it longer or shorter than the original? This will help you gauge completeness. When translating from English into French, Spanish or other Romance languages, expect to see around 30 percent growth.

Similarly, from these languages into English will be 30 percent shorter. A well-written German text translated into English expands around 20 percent. But take caution! Subject matter can really influence how much expansion or reduction you see from one language to another. For example, parts lists and material safety data sheets (MSDS) from German into English can expand as much as 40 percent.

A quick Google search will pull up word expansion charts, or your translation provider should be happy to provide this. Regardless, when you don’t speak the language, it’s helpful to know how to quickly surmise whether anything is likely to have been added or taken out.

3. DON’T: Get upset if some names or numbers are in different places.

We once had an American client panic, thinking the date on her contract had been changed from March 2nd to February 3rd. Of course it hadn’t! Americans put the month before the day, and she was unaware that most countries do not. So, the U.S. 3/2 had to be changed to the French 2.3.

A thorough translation takes more into account than words.

Basically anything you give us that has meaning – numbers, symbols, punctuation – has to be looked at and transformed. Two sentences may become one; one sentence may become two.

You’d be surprised what has meaning that you never even thought about! Even commas can mean something entirely different in French than in English.

4. DO: Ask if your translation partner carries errors & omissions insurance.

Note that this is different from liability. While insurance regulations are different for Canada and the U.S., it’s important to note that standard liability often does not cover translation error. In fact, if you work with a U.S.-based provider, most liability policies actually have a clause stating they do not cover translation error!

It may not help that much with knowing whether the translation you got back is good, but knowing your provider has the right kind of insurance in case it isn’t may help you rest easier at night.

In the end, purchasing international business translations isn’t nearly as intimidating as it might seem.

After all, trusting another business to convey your message in a language you don’t understand is a bit like feeling around in the dark—it’s intimidating and if you mess up, you could hit an obstacle that hurts your business.

Very few of us know how to make our own flashlights at home, but we still trust their ability to help us navigate at night. Similarly, you don’t have to speak multiple languages in order to be able to shine a light on your project—you just need a little help.

Have you ever received or seen a badly translated business document? Do you think it affected the success of the project or even the credibility of the business involved?

Before you go online too hastily, there are instances when it pays to have a human professional translate your document or website. And there are also instances when you need a machine and a human working together. So how do you know when is which? Ask yourself these questions:

Question #1: How confidential is your information?

If the answer is even just a little bit, go human. In order to improve the future translations their tools provide, machine translators like Bing and Google Translate keep what you put into their sites. So you shouldn’t use the service for anything you don’t want competitors or the general public to see. Since your information stays on their servers, it could potentially be accessed by others. Confidential or proprietary communications—such as contracts or private client communications—should never be run through the machine translation.

Question #2: Is it important to get the translation right?

If there’s a lot riding on this document, go human. If it’s something casual that won’t affect business to a great degree, go machine. Machine translators are great for a one-off or for quick casual emails, but they are not a reliable tool for important international business communications or for legally-binding documents. While machine translation is much better than its reputation leads many to believe, tools like Google Translate are at best 70 percent effective. This means there will be errors in the translation you get back. The question is, are errors okay? Even Google Inc. itself does not use Google Translate for its most important corporate translations, opting to work with professional translation companies instead.

Question #3: Do you need a complete, full understanding or just to know the gist?

Machine translation is a great resource for discrete business use. It can be very helpful if you receive a customer email in a foreign language that you feel is not confidential communication. It can give you a general sense of the subject of the email and whether or not you should invest in professional translation for it or similar documents. Machine translation is also great for stand-alone words or phrases.

Question #4: Do you need it back immediately?

This is an area in which machine translation comes in especially handy. The trick is to balance time concerns with any confidentiality or quality considerations you may have. This is when professional, paid machine translation—as opposed to a free tool like Google Translate—is useful. Many top-line translation companies offer a mix of human and machine translation that our industry calls machine translation post-editing (MT+PE). If you require a real-time, on-demand solution that balances time with quality, this may be the way to go since MT+PE blends advanced machine-technology and human translation to enable speed and improve quality. Working with a private MT engine, as opposed to free ones online, will also ensure your competitors don’t see your translations.

Translation companies—or the good ones at least—are like any other strategic sales partner your company has. Your translation provider should ask about your larger goals and how your current project fits into those goals.

Be wary of any translator—machine or human—that doesn’t add value to your larger communication strategy.

Be even more careful, though, of any partner that blindly dismisses the use of machine translation technology. Even though it’s not perfect, it does have its place. You have to leverage technology to stay ahead of your competitors; your translation partner should as well.

The true danger is using either a machine or a human translator blindly, without thinking about what kind of results you want or what kind of results you’re going to get. Translation done correctly is not a cost center; it’s a profit driver. And just as with any other aspect of your business, you have to ask the right questions in order to get the right returns.