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Translation cost per word or line? | ||
Tags: Career | Translation | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Languages & Work |  | |
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5871 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes  1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 1 of 9 02 August 2011 at 2:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hi,
Can I have the attention of the translators? :) Now I normally help with tutoring and not translating. I'm not really a translator (#^-^#) Only on occassion do I help translate a short email, so I'll probably just end up cutting the student a deal. But this piece I've just been given is pretty long -- and technical (auto tool making) -- and depending on how long it takes I'll have to start charging, eventually. (EDIT: translation is German to Eng) I'm trying to decide how to do that. In Germany the words get pretty long, so I can't charge per word like they do for English. I once had press text for an art broschure professionally done and the texter used a "Normseite", which I can probably find for free somewhere (I think it's 55 keystrokes per line). I'm just curious. Is it always the target language that gets charged? How do you calculate your fees? Per word, per line, per page? If this has been addressed before, I apologize. Thanks for your replies! (Links welcome!) Edited by Sunja on 02 August 2011 at 2:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5871 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 2 of 9 02 August 2011 at 4:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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Guess what.
I just calculated what I would make if I charged for the translation. I found/used Charcount. 1284 Zeichen 1023 Zeichen ohne Leerzeichen 229 Wörter 15 Zeilen 23,3 Normzeilen 0,86 Less than a page. I would make less than I do from an hour of tutoring, and that's pretty pathetic. That solves that ;) I'm still interesting in hearing about any experience with rates/charging for the various languages! (I know it's different depending on the target language) Edited by Sunja on 02 August 2011 at 4:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iwwersetzerin Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member Luxembourg Joined 5455 days ago 259 posts - 513 votes Speaks: French*, Luxembourgish*, GermanC2, EnglishC2, SpanishC2, DutchC1, ItalianC1 Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 3 of 9 02 August 2011 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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In German-speaking countries, charging per target-text line (usually 55 characters with spaces) is the most common method, but some agencies are switching to source-text words. I haven't come across charging per line a lot outside of German-speaking countries, source-text words seems to be the norm elsewhere, especially for translation agencies.
I personally prefer to charge by source-text word, especially for direct clients (as opposed to translation agencies), for the simple reason that the client knows from the beginning how much it is going to cost him and you can give a firm estimate. But it is really up to you. When you translate from German, you have to take into account that there are comparatively less words and adapt the word price accordingly. Charging per standard page is frequent in Italy and also used by the EU institutions. Here's a very handy tool to convert source or target word price to character or line based prices and vice-versa: FeeWizard 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5871 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 4 of 9 02 August 2011 at 6:57pm | IP Logged | ||
That's a really good point! Sharper estimates would make the customer happier. I wouldn't be able to give a fixed price until the translation were finished, using the text line/character-counting method. (I'm assuming "text-line" is the same thing as the 55 characters per line) Just a thought on the word-counting method vs character-counting. (I've been comparing): words like Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebsw erkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft would not earn me much using the word-counting method. Whereas using the text line/character counting method it would earn a fortune! okay, that was a crazy example :D Perhaps better, if you have two words with the same meaning, and one word were longer than the other, the longer word would earn twice or three times as much (character-counting). I guess each language is different and the translator has to figure out what works best for what language! (I haven't experimented with FeeWizard yet, but I'll bookmark it!) The only thing I've heard of Germans using is the character (including spaces) counting method. There's usually a standardized doc. which might make it easy to compare languages (word to word ratios). It's a thought. I don't have any experience doing it myself... Edited by Sunja on 02 August 2011 at 7:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| wyctory Triglot Newbie Slovakia Joined 4315 days ago 3 posts - 4 votes Speaks: Czech, Slovak*, English Studies: German | Message 5 of 9 16 July 2012 at 10:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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Agency I work for charges per word, source language text.
Granted, I mostly translate English, but once I did an easy project in German - they still paid me by word, IIRC. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6383 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 6 of 9 17 July 2012 at 12:51am | IP Logged | ||
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In Russia it's per character count, with spaces. When anyone insists on not counting the spaces, the reply is "Ok, I'll remove them" :)))
There's also the standard coefficient for many language pairs, calculated based on the average length of words I think... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Majka Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic kofoholici.wordpress Joined 4443 days ago 307 posts - 755 votes Speaks: Czech*, German, English Studies: French Studies: Russian | Message 7 of 9 17 July 2012 at 10:41am | IP Logged | ||
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In Czech republic, translators get paid by "norm page". This is 30 lines by 60 characters per one norm page. It comes from old norm for typists - they were paid according to the same method.
In the age of computers, it is very simple to confirm the count - simply looking at number of characters including spaces and punctuation and dividing through 1800. Usually but not always this number is rounded to "half pages", except for certified translations, where all I have seen is rounding up to next number - meaning you get 3,1 norm pages but pay for 4 pages. The price per page can naturally vary, according to difficulty and how good is the source prepared (for example how much additional formatting will be needed in the target text). There are some exceptions to the norm page rule - but these are discussed in advance. Edited by Majka on 17 July 2012 at 10:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4451 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 8 of 9 17 July 2012 at 7:58pm | IP Logged | ||
If you were translating into Japanese that threat would be meaningless :-) actuallyimnotsurethatitsmuchofanissuewithenglisheitherevenif imanagetodroppunctuationandca pitalstoo 1 person has voted this message useful |
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