The people behind the work
Hire a Technical Translator, Not a Black Box
When you search for a technical translator, most agencies route you to a sales page and never tell you who will actually translate your manual, your patent, or your safety data sheet. We do the opposite. Techniwords assigns your project to a named specialist with an engineering background, tells you who they are before you commit, and lets you talk to them when a question needs an expert answer.
Every quote names the translator we would assign, with their degree, language pair, and years of experience. No anonymous pool, no bait and switch after signature.
Our senior translators hold engineering degrees and worked in industry before becoming linguists. They read a P&ID or a GD&T callout the way your own team does.
Your project manager relays technical questions straight to the translator, and their questions back to your engineers. That loop is where translation errors go to die.
What a Technical Translator Actually Does
A technical translator converts engineering, scientific, and industrial content from one language into another without losing precision. The job looks like translation but behaves like technical writing: the translator has to understand what a torque specification, a validation protocol, or a hazard statement means before rendering it, because technical text punishes approximation. "Resistencia" can mean strength or resistance. A hyphen in a part number is not decoration. A misplaced decimal separator in a German datasheet changes a tolerance by a factor of ten.
That is why the qualification bar for this work sits so much higher than for general translation. A competent technical translator combines three things: native-level command of the target language, subject-matter knowledge deep enough to catch errors in the source document, and command of the tooling that industrial documentation demands, from CAT tools and termbases to DWG files and structured formats like XML and DITA. Someone who has all three is rare. Someone who has all three in your specific field is who you are actually looking for.
What Makes Someone Qualified for Your Project
When we evaluate a technical translator for the Techniwords team, we look at four things, in this order:
- Technical formation. An engineering or science degree, or verifiable years inside industry. This is the difference between a translator who looks up "lockout/tagout" and one who has stood next to the machine.
- Native target language. Every translator on our team works into their mother tongue only. A German engineer translating into German, not out of it.
- A track record in the document types you produce. Someone excellent on patents is not automatically right for safety data sheets, where phrasing is codified by regulation.
- Certification where it exists. The American Translators Association certifies specific language pairs through a proctored exam with a pass rate below 20%. Where an ATA program exists for the pair, we favor certified translators; where it does not, the engineering credential and revised work history carry the weight.
One test we always run: before joining the team, every candidate translates a real, previously revised technical document from our archive. The result is scored against the delivered version by the senior translator for that pair. Most applicants fail on terminology consistency, not grammar. That is exactly the failure mode that never shows up in a resume.
Meet the Technical Translators Behind Techniwords
These are the senior specialists who lead our most requested language pairs. Each one has a full profile with their background, sectors, and the document types they handle, on our technical translators page.
| Translator | Pair | Background | Experience |
|---|---|---|---|
| Miguel Ferrer | EN > ES | BS Mechanical Engineering, ATA-certified (EN>ES) | 16 years, industrial machinery, oil & gas, EHS |
| Anke Hoffmann | EN ↔ DE | Dipl.-Ing. Electrical Engineering (RWTH Aachen) | 18 years, automotive, industrial automation |
| Wei Zhang | EN ↔ ZH | MS Chemical Engineering (Tianjin University) | 14 years, chemical processing, electronics |
| Yuko Tanaka | EN ↔ JA | BS Electrical Engineering (Tohoku University) | 15 years, semiconductors, patents |
| Claire Moreau | EN ↔ FR | MEng Aeronautical Engineering | 12 years, aerospace, defense, rail |
| Ji-hoon Park | EN ↔ KO | BS Electronic Engineering (KAIST) | 13 years, semiconductors, batteries |
| Ana Beatriz Souza | EN ↔ PT-BR | BS Chemical Engineering (UFRJ) | 15 years, oil & gas, mining |
| Marco Rossi | EN ↔ IT | MS Mechanical Engineering (Politecnico di Milano) | 17 years, packaging machinery, food processing |
Behind these eight leads is a wider network covering 60+ languages, every member vetted through the same process and working under NDA. Whatever the pair, the same rule applies: a named specialist translates, and a second independent linguist revises every sentence against the source before delivery.
How Working With a Techniwords Translator Goes
You do not manage the translator yourself, and you are never cut off from them either. A project manager in your time zone handles scheduling, file preparation, and delivery, which is what makes deadlines hold. The translator handles meaning. When the source document is ambiguous, and real technical documents often are, the translator's questions reach your engineers through the PM within hours, not at delivery time as a list of untranslated segments.
For recurring work, the same translator stays on your account. Your terminology decisions accumulate in a client-specific termbase, so the vocabulary your team approved in March governs the manual translated in November. The full workflow, from quote to delivery, is laid out on our how it works page, and the checks behind it on our quality assurance process page.
Freelance Translator or Agency: an Honest Comparison
You can hire a freelance technical translator directly, and for a single language pair with a technically fluent person on your side to manage revision, it can work well. The trade-offs show up at scale. A freelancer covers one pair and one specialty; a documentation set that ships in five languages needs five vetted specialists plus someone reconciling terminology across them. A freelancer on vacation is a stopped project. And independent revision, the step that catches the errors the translator cannot see in their own work, is precisely what a solo setup does not include.
What we built at Techniwords is the version of "hire a technical translator" that survives contact with real projects: named specialists you can vet, wrapped in revision, terminology management, and project coverage that does not depend on one person's calendar. You get the person and the process. Pricing works the same way it would with a freelancer, per word at published rates, with an itemized quote before you commit anything.
Written by the Techniwords team. Technically reviewed by Anke Hoffmann, Dipl.-Ing. Electrical Engineering (RWTH Aachen), 18 years of technical translation experience. Last updated August 2026.
Hiring a Technical Translator: FAQ
How do I know which translator will work on my project?
Your quote names the translator we would assign, with their language pair, technical background, and years of experience. For larger projects you can review the full profile before work starts, and for ongoing accounts you keep the same translator across projects. If the named specialist is unavailable for a rush job, we tell you who replaces them and why they are qualified, before you approve.
Does a technical translator need an engineering degree?
Not always, but it is the strongest single predictor of quality we have seen in 15 years of scoring test translations. What the work absolutely requires is subject-matter competence deep enough to notice when the source document itself contains an error. An engineering degree is the most common route to that competence; a decade inside a plant, a lab, or a design office is another. We accept both and verify both.
What does it cost to hire a technical translator through Techniwords?
The same range you would pay a qualified independent professional: $0.10 to $0.25 per word depending on language pair, technical difficulty, and turnaround, with translation memory discounts on repeated content. The difference is that our rate includes independent revision by a second specialist and a final QA pass on numbers, units, and layout. Every quote is itemized, so you see exactly what you are paying for.
Can I hire your translators for an ongoing documentation workload?
Yes, and most of our volume works this way. We assign a lead translator and a backup for each language, build your termbase and translation memory, and reserve capacity around your release calendar. Document 200 sounds like document 1, because the same people and the same terminology produce both. Standing arrangements also shorten turnaround, since the team already knows your products.
Do you use machine translation and have a translator clean it up?
Not unless you order it. Our standard service is human translation by the named specialist, revised by a second linguist. For high-volume, lower-risk content we offer machine translation post-editing as a separate, clearly labeled service at a lower rate, where a specialized human editor reworks the output. You always know which workflow you bought, and safety-critical documents never go through the machine route.
Tell Us What You Need Translated. We Tell You Who.
Send your document and target languages. Within one business hour you get an itemized quote and the profile of the technical translator we would put on it. If the match is not obvious to you, it is not the right match.
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