Who is the intended audience of your document? Is it an internal memo or external advertising copy? A manual or a catalogue? Is it meant to inspire or inform?
These are key questions to address in the translation process. For marketing collateral, a slightly less literal approach is often appropriate: the key purpose of the translation is to render the original in a register which is appropriate to the market to which it is destined. Remember, though, that if it took five people half a day to agree on the phrasing of one sentence in the original text, this effect is multiplied in the translation process. There is always a payoff between total accuracy and appropriate phrasing, and two translators will often give different (but equally good!) versions of the same collateral.
For a technical document (a manual, for example, or an audit), accuracy is the key, and even the smallest imprecision or paraphrase could have serious consequences. With technical documentation, the most important characteristics of translation are precision, accuracy and consistency.
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