Traditionally, translated documents were simply given to the client – that completed the translator's responsibility.  This might work well for “single-user” translations such as academic and legal work, but the situation is radically different with mass communications.

For mass communications, the translation client ("the communicator") must know which prospects or customers read which language.  Obtaining this information is often expensive and time-consuming.  And when advertising to the general public, it's often not even possible to know which translation is needed for each recipient.  Language-specific databases are both incomplete and expensive, and are often out-dated.  For your existing customers, the information is available but requires staff resources to maintain and update. 

Following are the traditional contributors to the total cost of translating mass communications:

• gathering language preferences from your customer base
• inserting language information accurately into databases
• maintaining and updating these databases on a regular basis
• ensuring proper mail-merge implementation for each language to be distributed
• and even then, things can go wrong
  • the most frequent error:  mass mailings sent to the wrong language group
  • a real-life example of this error is available on request