How many pages is your document, really

A page is 250 words

The first thing worth knowing about what a translation costs is that the unit is not a sheet of paper. In this trade a page is 250 words of the original, and that convention exists because words are what take the time. A translator works through prose at a rate that has very little to do with how the prose was laid out. A sheet with forty words on it and a sheet with seven hundred are the same piece of paper and are not remotely the same job.

So when the rate card on this site says a page, it means 250 words of source text. Not a side of A4, not a scanned image, not a screen. Margins, type size, whether both sides were printed on and whether the office that asked for it calls the thing a form or a certificate make no difference at all.

Why one sheet is one page and another sheet is three

A birth certificate is usually one page in this sense, and often rather less than one. Most of what is printed on it is the form itself: the name of the register, the district, the field labels, the wording of the registrar's attestation. What was filled in is a handful of names, two or three dates and a place. There is a great deal to get right on that sheet and there is not very much of it to translate.

A sheet of a judgment is the other extreme. Solid type from the top of the sheet to the bottom, no headings to speak of, every line of it operative, and frequently a second column of citations down the side. One of those sheets is routinely three pages of translation. That is not a trick of pricing; it is three times as much reading, three times as much writing and three times as much checking.

It is also why the page counts printed beside every document type on this site are labelled as estimates every single time they appear. A divorce decree is put at about four pages and a court judgment or pleading at about twelve, and both of those numbers are there so somebody can guess before they measure. The estimator uses your count and never ours.

How to count yours in about a minute

If the document arrived as a file, the program it opens in will tell you the word count. Divide by 250 and round up, because nothing is sold in fractions of a page. That is the whole method, and for a contract or a manual it is exact enough that a quote rarely moves.

If it is paper — and most of what crosses this counter is paper, or a photograph of paper — count the words in one full line, count how many lines are actually full, and multiply the two. Do the same again for a second column if there is one. Add a rough allowance for the headings. The answer will be within a page of the truth on anything shorter than a bundle, which is all an estimate needs to be.

Then put that number into the estimator on this site. It prices a band at the top of the band, deliberately, so the figure that comes back is the most the job should be rather than the least. A quote after somebody has read the actual document is the figure to rely on, and it is the one that arrives after the reading rather than before it.

The parts that are not words and still take time

A certified translation accounts for everything on the page, and a good deal of what is on the page is not text. Stamps. Embossing. A seal with a device in it. A signature and the printed name under it. A line struck through and initialled. A note added in the margin eleven years after the original entry, which on a French extract is where the divorce, the change of name and the death are recorded. All of that is described on the translation, in the place where it sits, because an officer holding the two documents side by side is checking for exactly that correspondence.

Which makes the diploma or degree certificate the document whose page count tells you least about the work. It is one ornate sheet with very few words on it and several seals, and the words are the easy half: what takes the time is accounting faithfully for the parts that are not text.

The same goes in the other direction for anything unreadable. A word that cannot be read is marked as unreadable where it sits rather than guessed, and working out what can and cannot be read is done before a price is agreed rather than after.

The minimum charge, and what it is for

Small jobs meet a minimum of $60. The reason is not a rounding convention and it is not a penalty for bringing in one certificate: the checking, the formatting and the certificate take the same time on one page as on three. A single short record is read, counted, translated, read again by a second person and then certified by name, and none of those steps gets shorter because the document was short.

The practical consequence is worth knowing before you order rather than after. If you are close to the minimum anyway, the second document in the same matter is usually cheaper to do now than to do next month, and a further signed copy of something we have already translated costs a copy rather than a job. Order one more signed copy than you think you need. An office that keeps your copy does not give it back.

Where pages stop being the unit at all

Two kinds of work here are not priced by the page. Contracts, judgments, pleadings and corporate records are quoted by the word, because they are continuous prose and the length is simply the length; on those, the word count from the file is the quote and there is nothing to estimate. And interpreting is priced by the hour or by the half-hour block with a minimum, because what is being bought is a person's time in a room rather than a quantity of text.

If you are not sure which of the three your document falls into, the rate card sets all of it out on one page, and the estimator will ask you four to six questions and show you the arithmetic rather than only the answer.