Your business is looking to expand into new global markets, or gearing up to launch a big international campaign. The one thing you really need to go smoothly? The translations. Shopping around for the right language services provider, especially during a time crunch, can be stressful for businesses. With so many various options – from large translation agencies to freelancers to machine translation – the gut reaction is first to go with the most affordable translation solution.
How Traditional Translation Pricing Works
Unfortunately for customers, traditional translation pricing systems are generally confusing, complex, and riddled with hidden fees for “extra” services. No translation agency or freelancer is the same, and no standardized benchmarks truly exist for translators to adhere to when it comes to pricing or methods. With so many options, how can you know when you’re getting a great deal on high-quality translation or simply not getting your money’s worth?
Despite the confusing nature of the pricing of translations, there are a few general pricing models that both agencies and freelancers often use:
- Per Word
- Per Page
- Per Hour
- Flat Fee
Where these providers boast low-cost, high-performance work, this often comes with many added fees and hidden extra costs for anything beyond the most basic level of service. By making true pricing as confusing as possible, these translation services and agencies are betting that companies will just sit back and pay separately or extra fees for standard translation steps like:
- Editing and proofreading
- Final formatting
- Building and maintaining a translation memory
When all is said and done on the translation project, the actual price per word can be vastly higher than the listed price that first caught some attention – an unfortunate and costly detail that often goes unnoticed and is brought up only AFTER you’ve committed to them. In these instances, you can choose to keep the lower price option, but now with the understanding that it’s for the translation service only (with no proofreading involved), or even just for machine translations.
Translation Pricing for Language Department
Quality Translation with No Hidden Fees
Accessing high-quality, reliable, and affordable language services has traditionally been a struggle for organizations in a wide range of industries. With so much of translation work falling under the “you get what you pay for” mentality, we stand for providing transparent and flexible pricing for effective translations. We guarantee that our reliable and accurate translations will never contain hidden fees. As a trusted language services provider to organizations worldwide, we will never charge more for what should always be included in translation services.
We believe in transparency, simplicity, quality, and scalability when it comes to producing effective translations and localizations. The agreed upon price per word is exactly what you’ll be charged for our work, and never any more.
Translation Memory: Translate More, Save More
We employ a special pricing system that we like to refer to as “translate more, save more.” Using this model of pricing translation services, Language Department is more beneficial than standard language services providers for urgent and large projects, field-specific projects, and technical projects. With this structure, we create teams designed for a particular project (based on experience and knowledge of the subject matter), rather than pulling from a database whoever is available at the lowest rate, ensuring higher quality results.
Open Ticket System: Save on Minimum Fees
Our Open Ticket system is another perk that allows you to get short sentences translated at absolutely no cost – a huge benefit for businesses and individuals who have smaller-scale translation needs. As part of our ongoing efforts to serve our customers better, we are extending our Open Ticket service to all clients who open an account with us at no extra cost. This means that every request for translation, into any language with less than 250 words, will be charged by the hour and billed at the end of every month. There’s no need to worry about word counts or minimum fees, just send us an email with the content to be translated – it’s just like having your own personal translator available in an office next door!
Want to hear more about how our one-of-a-kind translation pricing structure works? Curious to understand how our pricing compares to other language services providers? Reach out to us anytime, we’re happy to answer any questions or provide a free project quote!
