A roll of plain white paper on a workshop windowsill beside an open case of steel machinist's tools set into cut foam

When the translation has to do a job

Technical translation

Manuals, specifications, safety documentation and drawings.

By the word, at the technical rate.
We read it and quote before starting

Technical documents repeat themselves, which is why this is the cheapest of the professional rates and the work where machine translation with a human editor genuinely earns its keep. The part that is not cheap is the safety text: a warning is written to be obeyed by somebody holding a tool, and a warning that reads as a suggestion has failed even if every word of it is correct.

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

A glossary agreed before the work starts and held to across the whole set
Units converted where the document is going to be used somewhere with different ones, and flagged where they are not
Safety and warning text written as instructions rather than as prose
Callouts and figure labels kept aligned with the drawings they point at
Delivery in the source format, including the file types a manual actually lives in

What this is not

Nobody here certifies that a machine is safe or that a specification is met
We do not redraw figures, and text baked into an image is quoted separately because it is a different job
A translated standard is not the standard; the issuing body's own language version governs

What it costs

By the word, at the technical rate.

This is quoted by the word before anything starts. The row below is Technical, and the column is whichever of the three groups your language sits in — the same three groups the certified page rate uses.

Repetitive by nature, which is why this is the work where machine translation with a human editor genuinely earns its keep.

Work quoted by the word, by discipline and by language group. A second translator reading it before delivery is 8 cents a word on top, and it is included rather than extra on anything certified.
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

The whole rate card · Estimate this job

Straight talk

Where this is bounded

This straight answer bears directly on the work above: A machine cannot sign a certificate. The rest of the ten are below — they are one argument in ten parts and each links to the others.