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.
By the word, at roughly half the from-scratch rate.
When a machine did the first draft
Review of a translation done elsewhere
A second pair of eyes on something you already have.
People bring us translations that a relative did, that an office abroad supplied, or that came out of a machine, and want to know whether it will do. Sometimes the answer is that it is fine and needs a certificate. Sometimes it is that reviewing it will cost more than translating it again, which happens more often than anybody wants to hear and which we say before starting rather than halfway through.
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 first read and a straight answer about whether reviewing is the cheaper route
- A marked-up version showing what was changed and why
- A certificate over the corrected version, where it is a document that needs one
- No comment on who did the original, which is nobody's business and never useful
What this is not
- We will not certify somebody else's translation without reading every word of it against the source, which is what the review is
- A review does not turn a summary into a translation; a document that was abridged has to be done again
- We do not adjudicate a dispute about whether a translation was good enough
What it costs
By the word, at the review rate, with an honest answer first.
Reviewing is quoted by the word at 8 cents a word — the same rate as the second translator who reads a professional file before it is delivered, because it is the same act. What it is not is a fraction of the job: the reading is the work.
The table below is the from-scratch rate for every discipline, and it is here because the first thing this page owes you is an honest comparison. Where reading somebody else’s text against the source costs more than starting again, that is the answer you get on the day rather than halfway through.
| 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 We cannot translate what we cannot read. 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.