How much does a translation cost?

You’ve finally decided to export your products.

For Italy, you prepared a catalog of your products, with photos taken by a professional photographer, a [layout](/translation/ layout-dtp) taken care of by a trusted graphic designer, and for descriptions you relied on a capable copywriter.

Perhaps you’d like a version of this catalogue in French, Spanish, Italian, or German, depending on where you’re launching your products.

You want the quality of your promotional materials to reflect the quality of your products.

So you decide to ask a translation agency for a quote. You don’t have a clear idea of how the sector works, and you don’t know anyone who works in it. First you ask around, and then you look online.

You find three well-presented businesses with attractive websites, they sound polite and competent over the phone, and they provide the service you’re looking for. You ask them for a quote for, say, a Spanish translation of your catalogue.

This is where you get a surprise. You’re confused. And you start to feel sceptical. Why?

Because the quotes for translating your catalogue into Spanish are substantially different. The first is 30% more expensive than the second, and the second is almost double the price of the third.

How is this possible?

How much do translations actually cost?

Why are the differences so big?

Two of the translation providers mention so-called “assisted-translation technologies” which reduce production costs and improve quality. But what are they? Does this mean your texts will by translated by a computer? Are you about to pay for a service provided by a machine rather than by people? And in what way would this improve the quality?

Stay calm. You’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll tell you:

• how a technical translator works
• what aids a translator uses to improve the quality of his work
• what is computer-aided translation
• what is automatic translation
• what factors affect the final price of a translation service

How technical translators work

There is a lot of confusion going around about how translators use technology, not just among those in need of translation services, but often among those providing them too.

To get a sense of the impact of technology on the translation profession, we need to start from further back.

In the beginning, there was the typewriter.

And dictionaries.

And brochures and the reference materials that every translator would gather as and when they could by going to trade fairs, consulting experts in the specific niche fields they worked in, spending long hours painstakingly scouring magazine articles...

And then came the computer.

Translation was among one of the first professions to benefit from IT, but let’s get something clear here: by translators, we mean professionals whose job involves taking a text written in one language and transferring it to another, not those who translate by voice; they are interpreters.

With the advent of word processors and speech-to-text systems, the number of pages that could be written per hour increased exponentially.

However, while word processors did increase productivity, at some point it became clear that other tools were needed to make translators’ lives easier.

Using a spreadsheet or a table in a word processor made it easy to create glossaries of terms and expressions that cropped up a lot with a certain clients or that were common to a certain industry. At the same time, in the age of the computer and of automation, there had to be a way to get around having to retranslate or retype those same paragraphs that repeat themselves over and over in texts like user and maintenance manuals, legal clauses at the beginning of documents, or user safety explanations.

What is computer-assisted translation?

And there was the solution. Databases.

Somewhere along the way, someone decided to start storing all texts in databases as they were translated.

And thus were born what we call CAT tools, assisted translation tools, or translation “memories” (so called because they “remember” previous work).

Another clarification: “CAT” has nothing to do with cats. It is simply an abbreviation of Computer Assisted (or Aided) Translation.

A few years later, the internet arrived, making more dictionaries and consultation resources available to translators than they had ever dreamed of.

The landscape was unrecognisably and permanently changed.

There was, however, a price to pay. This technological revolution brought with it an inordinate increase in the number of translators on the market, which led to a price war that is still going on today.

Translators, who are always sceptical about technological innovation, were slow to warm to CAT tools. It took several decades before they became one of the most widely used professional tools in the industry. And to this day, there are still some professionals who choose not to use them.

Just as assisted driving systems (like cruise control or brake assist systems) in cars don’t drive vehicles by themselves, but rather help drivers to be more efficient, CAT tools help improve a translator’s efficiency, but they don’t replace them.

Even if a piece of software is used, and even if this software is becoming increasingly sophisticated, at the end of the day there is still a person behind it all, doing the translation work, reading all the texts, and typing in all the words.

As we will see, these systems are not to be confused with MT, or “machine translation”, where the translation is done entirely by a computer program, like with Google Translate.

Advantages of translation memories

So why are CAT tools used? What real advantage is there?

Most translators use CAT tools because these systems allow them to reuse sentences they have already translated. Rather than translating an identical sentence again from scratch, they “pluck” a translation from the database and insert it into the text with a simple click.

Not having to translate the same text twice means more material can be translated more quickly, and so the translator is more productive.

However, this article is not just about translators, but also (especially) about those in need of translation services.

Before we go on to talk about what the benefits are for those who choose professionals who use these programs, it’s important to understand how they work, or at least get a general idea.

To simplify as much as possible, assisted translation software takes the text to be translated and breaks it down into segments, i.e. smaller units, like sentences.

The translated segments are then saved in a database (the translation memories we spoke about above). Every segment of the original text is associated with the corresponding segment of translated text, a bit like in this example from English to Spanish:

The red ball is on the table.

La pelota roja está sobre la mesa.

When the translator finds the same sentence in the text, the software suggests the same translation. If the text is similar but not identical, the software assigns a percentage of coincidence to the suggestion and highlights the differing parts of the segment for the translator (e.g. by highlighting them in another colour).

For example, the same text may contain the sentence

The blue ball is on the table.

The system will suggest

[90%] The red ball is on the table.

La pelota roja está sobre la mesa

The translator will notice the highlighted word that is not present in the new original text, and see that the translation needs changing.

This translation memory system therefore allows previously translated segments to be reused.

On top of that, if the same sentence is repeated several times over in the text, the corresponding translation will be inserted automatically.

And this database, the memory, is not exclusive to a single document either. Translated phrases from one document can also be reused in different documents.

If your catalogue contains repetitive phrases on your website (like a business presentation or your business history, for example), you will be able to “reinsert” the translation, which has clear time and money-saving benefits.

Also, if a document is edited, the translator will only need to translate the updated parts, as the rest will appear as pre-translated.

CAT tools have another advantage too: they improve the uniformity and consistency of a text. Since CAT tools always give the same translation for identical passages of text, an identical sentence will always be transated the same way.

What cases are assisted translation tool most useful for?

The more repetitions a text contains, the greater the benefit of using an assisted translation tool.

The more uniform the original text is, the more effective the CAT tool. On the contrary, if a text contains repetitions of the same concepts formulated differently each time, the system will not recognise the underlying semantic equality and will therefore be unable to suggest the same translation.

In this sense, sticking with one translation agency over time will guarantee you better results, as the translation memory and glossary will be fed and updated constantly, meaning consistency will be maintained over time and throughout all your documentation.

Of course, if the text is not technical but involves a rather free translation, where clear correspondence at the sentence level just isn’t necessary (or should even be avoided), CAT tools are less effective.

However, even in these cases, translators can still make good use of other features of translation software.

In addition to the translation memory, CAT tools allow you to create glossaries or, to be more precise, terminology databases (often called “termbases”). These are lists of terms from the original language with their corresponding translations and any accompanying notes or illustrations.

In addition, CAT tools allow you to maintain the formatting and layout of the original text. Translators won’t have to worry about the format (which will remain intact) and can focus on the content.

Another very important feature is the ability to integrate dictionaries, spelling and grammar checkers, and quality control. Thanks to these tools, translators can make sure, for example, all the catalogue’s original product codes are kept in the translation.

So far, we have talked about CAT tools and assisted translation.

How is assisted translation different from machine translation?

It should be clear by now that assisted translation does not replace but assists the translator, while machine translation works completely independently, without any human intervention.

In many cases, CAT tools include a machine translation module within them, which displays an automatic translation of a segment (or phrase) in a window inside the program. In this way, translators can decide whether or not to use the machine-provided translation, especially when the translation memory does not contain any matches.

So, to sum up: translators can use a range of digital tools to increase their productivity and produce higher-quality texts.

What affects the price of a translation?

And how does this affect the client? Also, going back to our original example, how can an agency afford to offer a price that is considerably lower than that of the competition?

The answer is a little complicated.

Some agencies are completely transparent when it comes to their working methods, and set up discount matrices that can be applied to projects that use a translation memory.

This may be the case for the lowest-priced agencies. Since the technology allows them to be more productive (i.e. to translate more words in less time), the savings are passed on to the client by offering them lower rates.

On the other hand, there are agencies who do not believe clients should know about the productive process, and who for this reason have different pricing policies based on prestige criteria. These agencies are positioning themselves rather differently.

Even though the product on offer is essentially similar (and therefore costs the same), the cost incurred for other ancillary services, e.g. a dedicated agent, 24/7 support, perhaps a customized platform for managing translations (instead of just using email), is passed on to the client.

But what criteria do agencies that decide to offer discounts for the use of computer-assisted or machine translation technology follow?

Here is where it gets a bit technical again.

All CAT tools have a file analysis function which allows the original text to be compared with the content of the translation memory.

To put it simply, the result of this analysis is a table that shows the level of coincidence expressed in percentages. Depending on the percentage of similarity, there can be:

• total matches (100% or “full” matches), i.e. phrases identical to those translated in the past
• “fuzzy” matches, or partially translated sentences
• zero correspondence (no match), meaning new sentences that need translating from scratch.

The agency may then use the results of this analysis to decide to apply discounts to the various levels of coincidence.

And what would be the right rate to apply, for example, to segments of text that do not to be fully translated by the translator?

There are no fixed standards as to the size of the discounts to be applied to different degrees of coincidence. However, as a rule, full rates are applied to “no matches”, those that need translating from scratch, an intermediate rate is applied to “fuzzy matches”, and a substantial discount is applied to “full matches” and repetitions.

But ultimately, how much does it cost to translate?

Translating costs a lot, usually more than someone from outside the sector might think. However, it is relatively low in comparison to other professional services.

The cost of a translation always comes down to a range of factors, two of which are fundamental:

1. the language pair, i.e. what language the original text is in, and what language it is being translated into
2. text complexity.

The cost depends on the languages

Due to the law of supply and demand, some languages are simply more expensive than others. For example, there are hundreds of thousands of translators in the world translating from English to Spanish, but far fewer who translate from Arabic to Norwegian, so the latter combination will be much more expensive than the former.

The cost depends on the complexity

The more complex a text is, the fewer professionals will be able to translate it. Almost any translator could translate a straightforward business letter, but if the text to be translated is a scientific article on theoretical physics, the number of translators who can handle the task is greatly reduced. These professionals are aware of how rare they are, and so charge higher rates.

Other factors affecting the cost of a translation

The rate is also affected by a number of secondary factors like:

• the type of translation required, whether technical, literary, legal, marketing, etc.
• urgency
• the format the text is provided in.

It’s clear to see why the cost of a translation would depend on the type of service requested, and on urgency, but the reason why file format might affect your quote is much less obvious.

In a nutshell, certain file formats (such as those containing website or software code) are difficult to extract translatable text from and require a number of conversion tasks (also called pre-processing or pre-flight), meaning extra hours of work that raise the final cost.

A concrete example: the translation of a catalog

To get a sense of what this could look like, let’s go back to our product catalogue. Let’s imagine it has about 100 pages with about 150 words per page, as well as multiple images and diagrams, with a total of about 15,000 words.

Until a few years ago, translators translated between 2000 and 3000 words per day (estimated for a non-“exotic” language combination with an average level of text complexity).

Nowadays, with the help of information technology, the average has vastly improved and sometimes one can translate even more than twice as many words in the same time (an 8-hour workday).

However, as well as translation costs, there are also administration and project management costs to be considered.

According to our previous calculations, this would take 30 to 40 hours to translate. On top of that, we need to factor in administration, revision, and management time. Let’s say it takes 50 hours.

To put the cost in context, let’s consider that in Italy, a house cleaner earns about 10 euro per hour. An IT consultant earns at least 60. A criminal lawyer’s fees can range between 120 to 600 euro per hour.

How much is an hour of a translator’s time worth? What about that of a proofreader or a project manager following the project, or the worker taking care of the administrative side?

It’s a tedious question, because the market unfortunately does not create a price based on a service’s “intrinsic value” (which could be calculated proportionally to the number of years of study and necessary experience required to deliver the service successfully), but on the value perceived by those buying it.

And this is where we come up against the reality that translation services, although considered important, are almost never equated with high-level services, such as those of a lawyer, for example, but are always considered ancillary to other purposes (usually to sell).

The price of translating the catalogue, if we considerate it on an hourly basis, will therefore be closer to the price of a similar professional service, like that of a graphic designer or typographer.

But there’s more.

The final quote will largely depend on the margin applied by the service provider, which in turn depends not only on the purchase and management costs, but also on the comparison with market prices and on the type of client.

This is what explains the huge differences between quotes.

Now that you know all this, you will be able to make a more informed decision about whom to entrust your next translation to. And if you still have doubts, don’t hesitate to express them in the comments section.