Defining Translation Service Prices

If you have ever sent a translation request, you have probably wondered how translators and translation agencies define service prices.

TRANSLAND translation agency offers services related to translation, interpreting, editing and proofreading, and subtitling. Here is how they are priced.

After receiving a request, our translation team analyzes it and provides you with pricing options. Prices vary depending on the service type, requested deadline, etc. They can even vary within the same service.

Let’s take translation as an example. When a customer submits written material that needs to be translated in some other language, it requires an in-depth analysis. This mostly refers to the terminology used in the documents. Despite the fact that our translation agency covers different fields, we must all agree that translating oil and gas terminology is not as easy as translating regular business correspondence.

Also, creating or translating subtitles for a consumer film can be less complicated than doing the same for a video that promotes different products and services or subtitling educational movies. In addition, there is simultaneous interpreting, which is much more demanding than consecutive interpreting.

Due to all previously listed reasons, it is simply impossible to define translation service prices that would be unique for all services because prices reflect the effort that translators/interpreters make to complete their tasks. However, all the services have one thing in common – their “unit of measure”.

Translation services are quoted per translation page containing 1,800 characters (letters) with spaces or 250 words. The number of characters/words is easily verifiable in any word document (by clicking on the number of words in the lower left corner of your document) while volume discounts are available for large projects.

On the other hand, interpreting services are commonly charged per hour. In case the interpreter’s presence is needed during a whole day or longer, we can offer a fixed price per day or the entire requested period. Several hours of constant interpretation require several interpreters that switch every 30 minutes, especially if we’re talking about simultaneous interpreting as the most demanding form of interpretation.

Subtitling and speech translation are quoted per minute or hour, depending on video content duration.