The two determining items on which companies rely when outsourcing their translations are quality and cost. When it comes to quality, you are not content with anything but the best. But when it comes to cost, you do everything to make it as cheap as possible. However, no Portuguese translation company of excellence will offer their services for a lower value than in fact they are worth. And precisely because of this, you will rarely find the values of their services on their sites. There is also another reason why Portuguese translation companies do not disclose their base price. Each translation project, be it in Portuguese, English or a less common language, is different and requires different levels of expertise.While there are companies in Brazil and other parts of the world that expose the prices of their services on their pages, experts recommend that you do not choose them because of their unified pricing approach. In other words, you can end up paying more expensive, both in terms of quality and financial cost.So, how do you calculate the price of a translation?Keep reading and you will find out.
1. Language
Some languages have a higher translation cost than others. For example, consider the cost of translating from Icelandic to Japanese and compare the cost of translating from English to Spanish or English to Portuguese. The first example costs more than the second because they are less common languages. And in these cases, English generally serves as an intermediate or interconnected language, meaning the translation service provider will translate from Icelandic to English and will convert from English to Japanese, thus adding an extra layer of translation and costs to the project.
2. Deadline
Do you need a translation as fast as possible? So be prepared to pay more. According to a recent report, 88% of translation service providers charge between 10% and 200% more for short-term projects.
3. Size
The size of the project is directly proportional to its cost. For example, consider an internal memo from a company´s website being translated into a second language and a manufacturing operations manual being translated into multiple languages. Of course, you will be paying more for the manual as it has a larger word count than the memo.
4. Complexity
Translation of highly complex and technical content requires a translator specialized in the subject matter and the services of these professionals aren’t cheap. Moreover, projects of this type sometimes require additional services for content familiarization, quality assessment, quality assurance, dubbings, and so on, which will cost more money.
5. Quality
Every company measures quality differently. For example, a translation of “good quality” will mean something different for a pharmaceutical manufacturer when compared to an advertising company. On the whole, “good quality” means avoiding mistakes. To reduce mistakes, you’ll need additional reviews that can be done by experienced reviewers and top-level editors. And you will have to pay extra for this service. Even considering all of this, in the end, it does not matter how much you paid for the translation service, it will still be cheap compared to your return on investment. In fact, according to a recent survey, translations cost between 0.25 and 2.5 % of the resulting international revenue. In other words, you will pay something between US$ 2,500 and US$ 25,000 in translation services that will generate US$ 1,000,000 in revenue. In most large companies, this cost equals their utility bills.
