When a machine did the first draft
Review of a translation done elsewhere
A second pair of eyes on something you already have.
By the word, at the review rate, with an honest answer first.
When a machine did the first draft
Machine translation with human review
A machine writes the draft. A translator reads every line and is answerable for it.
We offer this openly, we price it at about half, and it is on the rate card next to everything else. The reason is simple: a company arguing that machine translation cannot do certain work, while quietly using it for the work it can do, is not making an argument. What you get is machine output read end to end by a translator against the source, corrected, and delivered with the same person's name on it as any other job. What you do not get is a discount on the reading — the reading is the work, and a review that skims is the failure mode this service has.
About the cheaper option. We use machine translation on some work, we say so, and we charge about half for it. What it cannot do is sign a certificate of accuracy, because that is a person taking responsibility. Which work falls on which side of that line is on its own page.
The two lists
What you are buying, and what you are not
The second column is the more useful of the two. Most of what goes wrong in this trade is somebody paying for a thing they believed they were getting and were never told they were not.
What this includes
- Every line compared against the source, not spot-checked
- Terminology forced to a glossary, which is the thing raw machine output is worst at across a long file
- The same translator answerable for the result as on any other job here
- A note of anything the machine got confidently wrong, because that is what you are paying to have caught
- A candid answer about whether your file is suitable, before you buy it
What this is not
- Anything that needs a certificate, because the certificate asserts a person did the translating
- Marketing copy, where the machine draft anchors the writing to the wrong sentence and costs more than starting clean
- Handwriting, poor scans, or a document whose layout carries meaning
What it costs
By the word, at roughly half the from-scratch rate.
This is quoted by the word before anything starts. The row below is Machine translation with human review, and the column is whichever of the three groups your language sits in — the same three groups the certified page rate uses.
Roughly half the rate of the same text translated from scratch, and it is on this card because pretending we do not offer it would be the dishonest way to sell everything above it.
| The work | Group one | Group two | Group three |
|---|---|---|---|
| Legal Contracts, filings, pleadings, evidence, corporate records. |
24 cents a word | 29 cents a word | 35 cents a word |
| Medical and clinical Records, discharge summaries, consent forms, study documents. |
26 cents a word | 31 cents a word | 37 cents a word |
| Financial and corporate Statements, audit reports, tender documents, board papers. |
22 cents a word | 27 cents a word | 33 cents a word |
| Technical Manuals, specifications, safety documentation, drawings. |
22 cents a word | 26 cents a word | 32 cents a word |
| Marketing and website Campaigns, landing pages, product copy, brand material. |
32 cents a word | 38 cents a word | 45 cents a word |
| Machine translation with human review Machine output, read end to end and corrected by a translator. |
11 cents a word | 14 cents a word | 17 cents a word |
Straight talk
Where this is bounded
These straight answers bear directly on the work above: A machine cannot sign a certificate and “Certified” describes the translation, not the translator. The rest of the ten are below — they are one argument in ten parts and each links to the others.
When a machine did the first draft
The rest of this half of the office
Sorted by who is going to read the result, which is the only question that changes what the work has to be.
Send us the document
A photograph is enough to quote from. Or work out the figure yourself first — the estimator shows its arithmetic rather than only its answer.