Calculating the cost of a translation: 5 factors that influence rates

In a globalized world where communicating between different countries and languages is commonplace, translation is ever more in demand. The need to translate documents, websites, technical manuals and many other types of text is forcing people and companies alike to go to the professionals.

But how can you calculate the cost of a professional translation? To give a quote for a translation, the professional needs to take various factors into consideration. For example, is it a specialized text? What is the language combination? How long is the document? When is the deadline? What work approach is required? Let’s take a look at them together.

The area of specialization

A text can fall into many categories, be it a legal, technical, medical, literary or advertising text – to name a few. Each type of text requires specific skills and sector-based knowledge, and a professional translator’s subsequent rates will vary accordingly.

The language combination

The language combination is another important factor when calculating the cost of a translation. Some language combinations are more common and therefore less costly, while others call for greater expertise and cost more as a result.

Document length

The length of a text is certainly another factor worth considering. The translation quote can be calculated based on either the number of words or the number of characters to be translated.

Should rates be set by the character or by the word?

There are different ways to calculate the length and subsequent cost of a text. The most common method is to count how many words are in a document, and set a standard rate per word.

Setting rates per character is another option, and two distinct goals can be determined:

• the business character count corresponds to 1500 characters (with spaces) and may be used by some public administrations as an alternative to word count to calculate translations that are not of a literary nature;
• the liteditorial character count corresponds to 1800 characters (spaces included) and is used to calculate the cost of a translation carried out for a publisher.

There is also line calculation (55 characters) which is only used in German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria and Switzerland).

The repetitiveness of the content

It might be possible to lower (sometimes substantially) the cost of a translation if the document in question contains a lot of repetitions. In this case, the translator can adopt the help of computer assisted translation tools, otherwise known as CAT tools.

By analyzing the file and displaying the number of segments (which often correspond to sentences), the software can perform a practical calculation of both the total number of words and of how often they repeat, identifying exact repetitions as 100% matches and partial repetitions as fuzzy matches. These repetitions lower the total cost of a translation since the software will automatically suggest translations to the translator, so they need only correct or confirm them.

Furthermore, if the translation is assigned by a repeat client, it is likely that the translator will have access to a translation memory (TM), either provided by the client or created by the linguist. These are databases that contain all previous translations, and are updated every time a newly translated sentence is added. These memories should be included when calculating the quote as they are likely to further reduce the cost of the assignment by increasing the number of matches.

The deadline

The working time required for a translation is a determining factor when estimating the cost. If the deadline is tight and the job is urgent, then the cost will go up since the translator will need to put other projects on the back-burner or even work outside of their usual office hours.

The translation process

A professional translation must be completed by a translator who is mother tongue in the target language and meets theISO 17100 standard requirements. However, the work approach can vary depending on the level of quality the client requests – and this will affect the price. Depending on how the final translation will be used, it is possible to either ask for a basic translation or for a translation with a quality checking stage where revisions are carried out by a second professional translator.

It is important to keep all of these aspects in mind especially for those who, as clients, are entering the translation world for the first time and want to get an idea about how much a service should cost.

Do you want to know how much your translation project should cost? Ask us for a quote.