Agribusiness Translation: Avoiding the Cost of the Learning Curve
jul 8 2025
In 2023, a US-based translation agency sent us a user manual for a harvesting machine to be translated into Portuguese, along with a translation memory to be leveraged.
A harvesting machine? I thought. That must be simple. After all, how complex could a piece of farm equipment be?
Then I looked at the project details:
- Number of pages: 1,358
- Note: The client will likely make numerous changes to the translation, and the implementation of those changes must be included in the price.
What? 1,358 pages about a harvesting machine? And lots of client revisions expected?
So, I opened the material.
What I found was completely surprising: the manual described a highly sophisticated control software—and it was extremely hard to understand.
But why was it so difficult? We’ve been translating software manuals for decades. Why did this one feel so esoteric?
The reason soon became clear: I had no familiarity whatsoever with agribusiness. Every noun and verb in that text referred to components and actions I didn’t recognize. I simply couldn’t grasp the meaning of the sentences. And I realized that any other typical translator would likely face the same problem.
I saw this as an opportunity.
I assigned the task to one of our best in-house translators and told him:
— Take as much time as needed. Do in-depth terminology research. Study the product brochures to see images. Find information however you can—but make sure you understand each paragraph before translating.
And that’s exactly what he did.
Then came another surprise: the translation memory provided was full of errors. That explained why so many client revisions were expected!
The agency that sent us the job was thrilled, and since then, we’ve been regularly translating this kind of material for them.
The bottom line? After all that effort, we now have true expertise in agribusiness translation.
For years, we’ve partnered with multilingual agencies in sectors such as IT and Life Sciences. Now, we’re also ready to partner in agribusiness—so they can skip the steep learning curve and benefit immediately from our experience.
Marcos Chiquetto is an engineer, Physics teacher, translator, and writer. He is the director of LatinLanguages, a Brazilian translation agency specialized in providing multilingual companies with translation into Portuguese and Spanish.
