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.