Translation Quote for Non-Editable Documents

Translators can work with nearly any type of document format. This includes MS Word, PDF, image files such as JPEG, Powerpoint, and numerous others. However, some formats are easier to quote than others.

How Translation Pricing Is Calculated

Translation pricing is calculated according to the word count. For editable files a word count can be determined exactly, either via the native format word count function (such as in MS Word) or through special tools that translators use.

Non-Editable Text Documents

Document files that can’t be edited do not lend themselves so easily to quoting since the word count can usually only be estimated and not determined exactly. In these cases translation quotes are prepared based on the word count of the target language which is only known at project conclusion.

Quoting Based on Target Word Count

So for example today we quoted a project for French-to-English translation. The estimated source word count was in excess of 20,000 words, although since the documents were scanned PDFs and images, the exact source word count was unknown. To quote this project we estimated the word count via a manual review and quoted a per word rate times the target language word count that will be known exactly at project conclusion.

Some clients request a fixed price quote prior to the project start. Other pricing methods can be applied in such cases.