What it costs
The whole rate card
Every figure this office charges, on one page, because a company that will not publish its rates is asking you to find them out one quote at a time.
A page is 250 words, not a sheet of paper
This is the number everything below is multiplied by, and it is the one a reader who has not been told it will get wrong in the same direction every time.
In this trade a page is a unit of length rather than a piece of paper: 250 words, counted in the document you send us. Nobody outside the trade has any reason to know that, and it is the single most useful thing this site can tell somebody standing at a counter with a birth certificate in their hand.
It is why a one-sheet birth certificate is usually one page and why a dense sheet of a court judgment can be three. Count the words rather than the sheets and your own arithmetic will come out close to ours; count the sheets and a long document will look half its real length.
Work that is continuous prose rather than a record is not priced this way at all. Contracts, manuals, statements and websites are quoted by the word, at the rates further down, because the length of a file is simply the length of the file and dividing it into pages would only hide that.
Certified translation, by the page
The group your language sits in decides the page rate. The column beside each group says why, and the reason is the same one every time.
| Group | Why it costs what it does | A page |
|---|---|---|
| Group one | The largest pools of translators in this city, and the pairs we can usually staff the same morning. | $32 |
| Group two | A working panel rather than a queue of candidates — a day or two of notice makes a difference to who takes it. | $38 |
| Group three | A handful of people we trust in the pair, most of them working somewhere else at the time. The rate is what it costs to reach them, not a judgement about the language. | $46 |
There is exactly one thing behind these three figures, and it is the size of the pool of people in this city who can work in the pair and sign their name to the result. It is not a judgement about how hard a language is, how far away it is spoken, or how much anybody thinks a customer can pay. A language moves up a group when the people who can do the work are fewer and are usually busy somewhere else, and the rate is what it costs to reach them.
Saying that plainly matters more than it looks. Somebody whose document is in a group three language is being asked for more money than the person beside them in the queue, and a shrug is not an answer to that. The languages page says which group each of the languages we cover sits in, and why.
Work quoted by the word
Six kinds of work across the same three language groups. Nobody official is going to read the certificate on most of this, so the question is a different one: does the translated text do the job the original did.
| 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 |
Each of the six is priced where it is for a reason rather than by a multiplier, and the reasons are worth reading before querying a figure — particularly the highest rate on the card, which is the one people query.
Legal
Priced above general prose because a clause that reads two ways has to be found before it is delivered, not after it is argued about.
Medical and clinical
The highest general rate, because the terminology is unforgiving and because the reader is often making a decision about somebody's treatment.
Financial and corporate
Number formats are the trap rather than the vocabulary: a decimal comma read as a thousands separator is a factor of a thousand.
Technical
Repetitive by nature, which is why this is the work where machine translation with a human editor genuinely earns its keep.
Marketing and website
The most expensive rate on this card and the one people query. It is higher because the brief is to make somebody feel something in a second language, which is writing rather than translating, and it takes as long as writing takes.
Machine translation with human review
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 lowest figures on that card belong to machine translation with human review: 11 cents a word in group one, against 24 cents a word for a legal file done from scratch by a person. It is printed here rather than kept behind an argument, because a company that will not name the cheaper thing it also sells is not making an argument, it is making a noise. Where that is the right tool and where it is not has a page of its own.
The minimum charge
Small jobs meet a floor of $60, and it is on this card rather than in a footnote for the reason that it exists at all.
A single short record is the commonest job in this office, and the page rate on its own would predict a cheaper answer than the invoice. The reading, the checking, the formatting and the certificate take the same time on one page as on three, so anything below $60 of translation is charged at $60.
The minimum applies to the translation before speed and before any of the handling below it. A rush surcharge calculated on a figure that had already been lifted to the minimum would be a surcharge on the minimum, which is not what anybody agreed to.
The acts that are not translation
Three of the items below are somebody else's act that we prepare, lodge and bring back. The column beside each one says whose it is.
| Item | What it is | Fee |
|---|---|---|
| Certificate of accuracy | The signed statement that goes with every certified translation: who translated it, that they are competent in both languages, and that the translation is complete and accurate. It is included in the page rate and never charged for separately, because a certified translation without it is not one. | Included |
| Notarised signature | A notary public commissioned by the State of New York watches the translator sign the certificate, checks their identification, and completes a notarial certificate. What the notary attests is who signed. No notary in this country attests that a translation is correct. | $25 |
| Apostille handling | Preparing the notarised document for authentication, lodging it with the authority, tracking it and getting it back to you. The apostille itself is issued by a Secretary of State under the Hague Convention and by nobody else. The authority's own fee is passed on at what it costs. | $95 |
| Signed hard copy, posted | The signed and sealed original in the post, first class. Most filings take a PDF now and the PDF is included in the price; some consulates still want paper and will say so. | $15 |
| Each further hard copy | Signed and sealed the same as the first. Worth ordering one more than you think you need: an office that keeps your copy does not give it back. | $10 |
| Overnight courier | Tracked, next working day, where the post is not fast enough for a deadline. | $28 |
The first line is free and stays free. A certificate of accuracy is what makes a certified translation certified, so charging for it separately would be charging twice for the same object; it is in the page rate.
The rest are worth buying only where the office you are sending the document to asks for them. Most immigration filings take a certificate with nothing further attached, and being told that before you pay is worth more to you than being sold the extra step. Where an apostille is involved, the authority sets its own fee, changes it when it likes, and it is passed on at what it costs — it is not in the figures above and it is not ours to quote.
What speed costs
A multiplier on the translation and on nothing else. It never touches the notary's fee and it cannot touch an authority's.
| Turnaround | What it costs | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | The turnaround on the rate card. | What most work runs at. The dates are working days and they start when we have the document, not when you ask. |
| Next working day | Half as much again. | Somebody's evening, in practice. Available on records and on short files; on a long file it means splitting it between translators, which we will tell you before we do it. |
| Same day | Twice the rate. | Only on records, only where the document is with us before eleven in the morning, and only where somebody is free. We say no to this more often than we say yes, and saying no in the morning is more use to you than saying yes and missing it. |
There is no figure in that table on purpose. Speed is a multiplier rather than a price, and a percentage printed in a column of dollars invites a reader to add it to them. What it costs is said in words you can check against your own quote, and the estimator applies it to the translation line and to nothing else.
Interpreting
Spoken, live, and unreviewable afterwards, which is why the preparation is most of the job and why every mode below has a minimum.
| Mode | What it is | Rate | Minimum |
|---|---|---|---|
| On site, consecutive One interpreter, in the room, taking turns with the speaker. |
A meeting, a clinic appointment, a closing, a deposition where the parties are instructing us rather than the court. Two hours is the minimum because a booking shorter than that costs an interpreter the same half-day. | $115 the hour | two hours, $230 |
| Remote, video or telephone The same work down a line, in half-hour blocks. |
Often available the same day, and the right answer for anything short. What it is not good for is a room with more than about four people in it, because the turn-taking stops working and everybody talks over the interpreter. | $65 the half-hour | one half-hour, $65 |
| Simultaneous, with equipment Two interpreters in a booth, working in twenty-minute turns. |
Two, always, and this is not a way of charging twice: simultaneous interpreting cannot be sustained alone beyond about twenty minutes without the quality falling away, and a supplier who offers you one interpreter for a three-hour conference is selling you the third hour of a tired person. | $190 the hour | three hours, $570 |
Simultaneous work is always two interpreters, so the smallest real booking is $1,140 rather than $570. A supplier quoting the smaller figure is quoting one tired person.
The minimums are what an interpreter's time actually costs rather than a way of rounding a booking up. Somebody who turns down a morning to take a forty-minute appointment has still lost the morning, and a supplier who pretends otherwise is either not paying the interpreter or not sending one.
How the days and the figures are counted
Two standing notes that belong beside every price on this page.
What a working day is. Working days, starting the working day after we have a legible copy of everything. Public holidays are not working days and neither is the Saturday morning the counter is open.
Where the figures come from. Every figure on this site comes from the rate card, and the estimator shows its arithmetic rather than only its answer. What it cannot know is how many words are actually on your document, which is why a quote follows a reading and an estimate does not.
If you would rather see the arithmetic on your own document than read a card, the estimator asks about eight questions and shows every line it adds up. It is not an offer and it does not bind anybody, which is said on the page itself rather than in small print at the bottom of it.
Send us the document and we will quote it properly
A photograph is enough to quote from, and a quote follows somebody reading the actual document rather than a description of it.