If you require the services of a professional translator, you might wonder what’s better for you – to pay per word count, or per hour. Each of these options has its pros and cons, and now you can find out why most translating agencies charge their services by the “translator’s page” unit, i.e. word count.
Translating by word count
Determining the translation prices per word count has one main advantage, which is that you can know in advance the exact price of your translation. This way you can avoid any potential surprises and make sure that the client isn’t burdened by how much time the translation will take.
Charging translations by word count is also a good motivation for the translators themselves to continuously advance their skills and work methods in order to perform their job more quickly. In fact, this method of work also promotes development of new technologies and tools that help professional translators in their work.
Charging translations per word count also enables the clients to easily compare market prices and find an option with the best price to quality ratio, instead of wondering if they should choose for a translator who works faster but charges more per hour, or a slower one who charges less.
On the other hand, in terms of cons when it comes to charging for translations per page count, the translator is obliged to work for a fixated price. So what’s the problem? The problems arise in cases such as translating a poorly legible, handwritten document or a poorly scanned copy of a document. There is a lot more effort and time involved in order to make out what exactly is written on the paper. In other words, the translator invests drastically more time and effort than usual and therefore the price of their work is actually reduced.
What about translation prices per hour?
The answer to this question is – it depends on your perspective. The main advantage of charging for translations per hour is that the translator is at no risk of undercharging. They will charge for the exact amount of hours they’ve put in. Therefore, they don’t have to worry about the legibility of the document or whether its sentence structure and construction require a lot of thought.
However, the problem here is that the client has no way of knowing how much the translation will cost and the end price they have to pay at the end is usually significantly higher than expected, or when paying for the translations by word count. That, without any guarantee that the translation will be of higher quality.
In order to provide our clients the highest quality translations at affordable prices, our Alfa prevod translation agency charges per translator’s page. If the translation has to be deliver on a short deadline, multiple translators will be engaged in the same project.
