How much does a good translation cost?
01/03/19 08:37
The costs of having your text translated can vary widely. At the lowest end of the scale, they can be a zero. When approaching potential new clients at trade fairs or online, I am often told that the organisation in question has little use for external linguists as such-and-such in marketing is fluent in English/French or that the person I am talking to is happy enough to use Google Translate or Deepl. I have long since stopped contesting this opinion – not because I have been beaten by it, but because these people sometimes have a good point!
If you just want to convey a very simple message – a door sign or a thankyou e-mail, for example – I have no doubt that such services will almost always be more than sufficient.
However, that is not the service a quality LSP (Language Service Provider) like Molinos seeks to offer.
Our task here at Molinos is to provide our clients with translated texts which do not appear to the reader to be translations. To transfer the sense, the intention, the message of the text rather than just the translated words. Doing this naturally requires an extremely high degree of proficiency in the source language, but also a natural fluency and well-developed writing style in the target language. This is the kind of expertise which only comes with years of experience and training at the highest level.
A good LSP will always want to work in collaboration with its clients to produce results that are consistently in line with their aims, rather than simply churning out translations on any and every topic. Just as a marketing team or advertising agency would spend a considerable amount of time considering the image, semantics and effect of their communications, so an LSP should look to ensure that it is in a position to provide an equally professional service and to work with rather than simply for its clients
A good LSP is not one that says YES! To everything (20,000 words of medical text from Finnish to Swahili – yeh, we’ve just the person…) or one which bases its business model entirely on beating its competitors on price. With such providers, there will always be a catch – usually involving hidden machine translations and outsourced, unverified linguists.
So back to the question…what does this all cost?
While I believe that our rates are extremely competitive, they do reflect the quality of the delivered work and the expertise upon which they are based.
Our standard ‘per new word’ rate is €0.15. As we use SDL Trados software, we are then able to analyse our clients’ files for repeated words and phrases and offer them often significant sliding scale discounts for these. As a rule, we charge between €0.03 and €0.05 for proofreading while copywriting is usually billed for on an hourly or flat-rate basis by prior agreement.
If you just want to convey a very simple message – a door sign or a thankyou e-mail, for example – I have no doubt that such services will almost always be more than sufficient.
However, that is not the service a quality LSP (Language Service Provider) like Molinos seeks to offer.
Our task here at Molinos is to provide our clients with translated texts which do not appear to the reader to be translations. To transfer the sense, the intention, the message of the text rather than just the translated words. Doing this naturally requires an extremely high degree of proficiency in the source language, but also a natural fluency and well-developed writing style in the target language. This is the kind of expertise which only comes with years of experience and training at the highest level.
A good LSP will always want to work in collaboration with its clients to produce results that are consistently in line with their aims, rather than simply churning out translations on any and every topic. Just as a marketing team or advertising agency would spend a considerable amount of time considering the image, semantics and effect of their communications, so an LSP should look to ensure that it is in a position to provide an equally professional service and to work with rather than simply for its clients
A good LSP is not one that says YES! To everything (20,000 words of medical text from Finnish to Swahili – yeh, we’ve just the person…) or one which bases its business model entirely on beating its competitors on price. With such providers, there will always be a catch – usually involving hidden machine translations and outsourced, unverified linguists.
So back to the question…what does this all cost?
While I believe that our rates are extremely competitive, they do reflect the quality of the delivered work and the expertise upon which they are based.
Our standard ‘per new word’ rate is €0.15. As we use SDL Trados software, we are then able to analyse our clients’ files for repeated words and phrases and offer them often significant sliding scale discounts for these. As a rule, we charge between €0.03 and €0.05 for proofreading while copywriting is usually billed for on an hourly or flat-rate basis by prior agreement.
What is a TM?
01/03/19 08:37
Translation agencies or Language Service Providers (LSPs) often talk about the quality of their Translation Memories, or TMs.
So what is a TM and why is it important?
Put simply, just about every professional translator on the planet uses some form of software to speed up their work. Contrary to what you might expect, these software packages do not actually ‘translate’ the data fed into them (also this can be arranged by means of plug-ins, and is sometimes even what clients want). Instead, they allow the linguist to see both the original text and his/her translated work side-by-side and to make use of a TM.
Ah yes..what’s a TM?
Once a linguist translates a passage of text (SDL Trados, the most popular package calls them ‘segments’), the Translation Memory stores this for re-use as soon it encounters the same passage, or a similar one, at a later date.
This has massive benefits – the most obvious being that very repetitive texts (lists of data, for example) can be translated in a fraction of the time that would otherwise be required.
It also means, however, that LSPs can ensure clients a considerable degree of consistency – even over many years – in terms of vocabulary choice and style. Also, larger organisations such as vehicle manufacturers, will often have their own TMs which they will insist on all linguists using.
Combined with a “termbase” of pre-agreed terminology, a good TM allows linguists to offer unprecedented levels of speed while always guaranteeing consistency and accuracy.
Put simply, just about every professional translator on the planet uses some form of software to speed up their work. Contrary to what you might expect, these software packages do not actually ‘translate’ the data fed into them (also this can be arranged by means of plug-ins, and is sometimes even what clients want). Instead, they allow the linguist to see both the original text and his/her translated work side-by-side and to make use of a TM.
Ah yes..what’s a TM?
Once a linguist translates a passage of text (SDL Trados, the most popular package calls them ‘segments’), the Translation Memory stores this for re-use as soon it encounters the same passage, or a similar one, at a later date.
This has massive benefits – the most obvious being that very repetitive texts (lists of data, for example) can be translated in a fraction of the time that would otherwise be required.
It also means, however, that LSPs can ensure clients a considerable degree of consistency – even over many years – in terms of vocabulary choice and style. Also, larger organisations such as vehicle manufacturers, will often have their own TMs which they will insist on all linguists using.
Combined with a “termbase” of pre-agreed terminology, a good TM allows linguists to offer unprecedented levels of speed while always guaranteeing consistency and accuracy.