For today’s quick post, we wanted to touch on something that we’ve been thinking about a lot: the way translators charge for their services. Traditionally, translation services in the U.S. have always been billed by the source word, meaning the translator will know exactly how much she or he will charge the client before the process starts. And the client has an exact figure, which is helpful for them. In Germany and Austria, translation is usually billed by the source line (a line being 55 characters).

Changing existing pricing structures can be difficult, and most translation agencies have established processes based on per-word rates, so we speculate that there won’t be too much change there in the short term. So that’s why we will focus on direct clients here. We work only with direct clients, and not surprisingly, most have no idea how many words are on the documents/websites they need to have translated because as opposed to translators, they’ve never thought on a per-word basis. On most documents, it’s easy to count the words, but things get trickier with PDFs and with web-based content. For the past few years, we have started quoting many projects by the hour, because we feel that an hourly rate is something most clients understand quite well, as they are used to paying that for other professional services, such as lawyers, CPAs, therapists, etc.

We also like this approach because it elevates our profession in a way and puts it more on par with other professional services and moves away from this “piecemeal” approach that sometimes comes with per-word pricing. And ultimately, it’s all about making clients happy, and in our (not necessarily representative) experience we feel that clients have been pleased with the hourly approach. We also like this pricing structure because it makes sense to most clients. For instance: say a client brings you a five-page last will and testament. If you submit a quote for five hours’ work (for instance) at your hourly rate of, say $100/hour, that’s transparent and easy to quantify and understand. More.

See: Language Blog Translation Times

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