When this question comes up, there are usually two decisions, in this order; which languages your customers actually use, and who you get to do the work. Most businesses reverse that, start ringing around for quotes, and get three numbers that don't look related. One at $90, one at $400, one at $1,200. None of them is necessarily wrong but they're quoting different jobs, and nobody really explains that at the quoting stage.
What should a business look for in a translation service?
Start with what the job requires, not what the provider sells. If a government department, court or university has to accept the document, it needs NAATI certification. If nobody's checking credentials, what matters is whether the translator knows your subject matter. NAATI also endorses language service providers at company level and publishes that list, which is the fastest way to check a provider is what it claims to be.
That's the short answer. The reason it matters takes a bit longer.
When do you need a NAATI certified translation?
When the document is going to someone who has to formally accept it. Home Affairs, a court, a university admissions office, a licensing body. NAATI Certification is an attestation that the translation is a true and accurate rendering of the original, made by a translator NAATI has credentialled. Without it, the document gets rejected at the counter regardless of how good the translation is.
For everything else, certification isn't the question. Your website, your product range, your safety instructions, your quotes. Nobody's checking a stamp. What matters is whether the translator understands your subject and writes well in the target language.
That's not a split between two grades of translator. Plenty of NAATI credentialled translators are also the right choice for a campaign or a technical manual, and often they're the only people in a given language pair working at that level in Australia. The credential tells you they've been formally assessed. It doesn't tell you they can write advertising copy, and it doesn't rule it out either.
So the useful question isn't "certified or not." It's two questions. Who receives this document and do they require certification? And does this translator know the subject? A provider who can't answer both about your specific job is quoting blind.
That's also where the $90 quote comes from. It's usually machine output with a light tidy-up, priced against a job nobody scoped.
Which languages should you actually translate into?
In Fairfield (NSW), 69.4% of residents speak a language other than English at home, and the top three are Vietnamese, Arabic and Assyrian Neo-Aramaic. Cross to Casey in Melbourne’s south-east and the list looks nothing like it: Punjabi, Sinhalese and Hazaraghi.
5.5 million Australians speak a language other than English at home, which is 22.3% of the population, across more than 350 languages (ABS Census 2021). Those figures get quoted constantly and they're close to useless for a small business, because you don't sell to the nation. You sell to a few postcodes.
Pull the Census figures for the council area your customers live in, take the top three languages, and start there. There's a free map of Australia's language data by council area that does this in about a minute, rather than an afternoon in ABS TableBuilder.
Most businesses guess at this, translate into whichever languages sound most common, and end up with material nobody in their area reads. The council data takes it out of guesswork, and it usually points at fewer languages than people expect.
How do you check a provider is legitimate?
Three things, all verifiable before you pay anyone.
Check whether the company appears on NAATI's published list of endorsed language service providers. Endorsement sits at company level, which is different from employing someone who happens to hold a credential.
Check that it's Australian based, with an ABN you can look up.
Check whether it holds ISO 17100, which requires a second qualified linguist to review every translation before it's delivered.
Anyone can register a domain and call themselves a translation agency. A number of sites selling to Australian businesses are overseas marketplaces reselling individual translators' credentials, with no company-level accountability if something goes wrong. That distinction doesn't matter much on a café menu. It matters a great deal on a contract, a safety notice or a refund policy.
One more question worth asking: who actually does the work? If a provider won't tell you whether your translator is NAATI credentialled and working into their native language, that's your answer.
Does machine translation work for customer-facing content?
For internal use and rough comprehension, yes. For anything a customer reads and acts on, no, not unless a qualified linguist edits the output first. Machine translation is at its most confident when it's wrong. It produces fluent, natural-sounding text carrying the wrong meaning, and fluent errors are the hardest kind to catch, because nothing about them looks broken.
The businesses getting this right aren't avoiding the technology. They're using it for speed and putting a person in the loop wherever money, health or legal consequence is attached.
Here's the test worth applying. If a mistranslation in this document would cost you a customer, a claim or a fine, it needs a qualified person's name against it.
Why this year matters
Census night was 11 August 2026. The ABS starts releasing 2026 language data from June 2027, and the number of Australians speaking a language other than English at home will almost certainly pass six million.
Every business will see that headline on the same morning. The ones who benefit will be the ones who already know which languages their own customers speak and who they'd call to do the work properly. That groundwork costs nothing. It's an afternoon.
76% of consumers prefer to buy in their own language and 40% won't buy from an English-only website at all (CSA Research). Those customers are already in your catchment. They're just buying from someone else.