An agency is asked to translate a set of operating instructions for industrial equipment, a package insert for a medical device and a safety data sheet.
All three are documents where a mistranslated instruction has consequences that have nothing to do with language.
When to accept technical work
Accept it when you have translators with genuine subject expertise, when terminology can be controlled, when a specialist reviewer is available, when the client can supply reference material and when the timeline allows proper review.
When to decline
Decline when the only available translator is a competent generalist, when the content carries safety or regulatory consequences you are not equipped for, when the deadline prevents review, or when the client cannot provide the reference material that makes accuracy possible.
Establish the subject and the purpose
What the document is, who reads it, what happens if it is wrong and whether it is going to a regulator, a technician or a patient. The purpose determines the process, not just the price.
Ask about terminology
Whether the client has a glossary, existing translations, approved terminology or a style guide. Consistency across documents matters more in technical work than elegance ever does.
Explain your review process
Whether translation is reviewed by a second linguist, whether a subject expert reviews it, and whether the client reviews before publication. For regulated content this process is often the deliverable.
Ask whether a specific standard applies
Some sectors and some clients require particular processes or qualifications. Asking lets you either meet the requirement or decline honestly before accepting the work.
Explain back translation where relevant
Some regulated content requires translation back into the source language as a verification step. Clients in those sectors expect it, and clients outside them should be told what it costs before assuming they need it.
Be clear about liability
What you are responsible for, what the client is responsible for in approval and what your professional cover covers. Technical work needs this settled before it starts.
Price the expertise honestly
Specialist work costs more per word because the translator pool is smaller and the review is heavier. Publishing that, with the reason, prevents comparison against a generalist rate, which is the clarity argued in translation quote requests missing word counts and languages.
Ask for the source files
Formatting, diagrams, tables and embedded text in images all affect the work, and a scanned PDF of a technical manual is a different job to an editable file.
Say what you do with machine translation
Clients increasingly arrive with output from a tool and want it checked, which is a different service to translating from scratch and sometimes more work. Publishing whether you offer post-editing, how it is priced and where you will decline it because the source output is too poor to salvage prevents an agency quietly absorbing the cost of somebody else's shortcut.
Certification is a separate question
It is covered in certified translation enquiries for official documents.
Technical documentation behaves similarly everywhere
The parallel is in technical datasheet and certification requests, and capture at any hour works as in an AI receptionist for opticians.
Getting started
Publish the sectors you specialise in, your review process and what you decline, then capture the document, subject and purpose at any hour. SpideyChat for agencies answers from your published pages. Try SpideyChat on your own site, or read about capture on the features page.