When the translation has to do a job
Legal translation
Contracts, pleadings, evidence and corporate records.
By the word, at the legal rate.
When the translation has to do a job
Website and marketing translation
Campaigns, landing pages, product copy and brand material.
This is the most expensive rate here and the one people query, so the reason is worth saying plainly: the brief is to make a stranger feel something in a second language, and that is writing rather than translating. A headline that works in Spanish is frequently not a translation of the English headline at all. Where that is what is wanted we say so and quote for writing; where a faithful rendering is wanted, that is cheaper and we say that too.
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 brief about who is being sold to, because the same product is sold differently in Madrid and Mexico City
- Headlines and calls to action rewritten rather than rendered, where rewriting is what will work
- Length checked against the layout, because most languages run longer than English and break a button
- Everything a page needs and nobody remembers: the title, the meta description, the alt text, the form errors
- A note of anything in the original that will not travel — a pun, a local reference, a legal claim
What this is not
- We do not check whether a marketing claim is lawful in the destination country; that is a lawyer there
- We are not a search agency and do not promise a ranking in any language
- Transcreation is not certified translation and cannot be certified, because it is deliberately not a faithful rendering
What it costs
By the word, at the marketing rate — the highest on the card.
This is quoted by the word before anything starts. The row below is Marketing and website, and the column is whichever of the three groups your language sits in — the same three groups the certified page rate uses.
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.
| 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
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.
When the translation has to do a job
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.
When the translation has to do a job
Medical and clinical translation
Records, discharge summaries, consent forms and study documents.
By the word, at the medical rate.
When the translation has to do a job
Financial and corporate translation
Statements, audit reports, tender documents and board papers.
By the word, at the financial rate.
When the translation has to do a job
Technical translation
Manuals, specifications, safety documentation and drawings.
By the word, at the technical rate.
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.