5 Factors That Will Influence the Cost of Your Translation

The two determining factors based on which companies outsource their translation work are quality and costs. When it comes to quality, you will not settle for less. But when it comes to costs you’ll go on an overdrive to make things happen for less. However, the last thing a good translation company will ever want to do is to undersell their services. That’s precisely why a good translation company never puts up the cost details of their offerings on their websites. There is yet another reason valid reason for not being too upfront on costs. Each translation project is different and requires different levels of specialization.

Sure, there are companies that are listing the pricing details of their offerings, but experts’ advice you to stay clear to those service providers because of their blind approach to pricing.

So, how does translation pricing work?

Read on to find out.

1. Language

Some language translations cost more when compared than others. For instance, consider the costs of Icelandic to Japanese translations and the cost of English to Spanish translations. The former costs more than the latter because it involves translation between two less commonly translated languages. And in these cases English often serves as an intermediate or interlinking language, i.e. the translation service provider first translates Icelandic to English and then converts English to Japanese, thereby adding an extra layer of translation and costs to the project.

2. Turnaround Time

Need translations within the shortest possible time? Then be prepared to shell out extra dollars. In fact, as per a recent report 88% translation service providers are charging anything between 10% and 200% for quick turnaround projects.

3. Size

The size of the project is directly proportional to the cost. For instance, consider the example of a one-page internal company memo being translated into a second language and a manufacturing operations manual being translated into multiple languages. Naturally you will be paying more for the latter as it has a larger word count compared to the former.

4. Complexity

Highly complex and technical content demands subject matter experts and the services of these professionals are not cheap. Also such projects may sometimes require additional services for content familiarization, quality evaluation, quality assurance, voice-over and so on, which will understandably cost more money.

5. Quality

Every company has a different measure of quality. For instance, a “good quality” translation will mean something different for a pharmaceutical manufacturer when compared to an advertising company. In general, “good quality” means avoiding errors. To reduce errors, you’ll need additional rounds of proofreading, which can be done by expert proofreaders and senior-level editors. And you will have to shell out extra for this.

At the end of the day, no matter how much you pay for a translation service, it is still cheap when compared to your return on investment. In fact as per a recent survey, translations cost between 0.25 and 2.5 percent of the resulting international revenue. Or to put it in other words, you’ll be paying something in between $2,500 and $25,000 for translation and generate $1,000,000 in revenues. This price in most big companies is equal to their utility bills.