[Rory]

I have been asked by a company to do some translation and to quote them a price but I have no idea how much to quote.

Does anybody have a rough estimate of how much you should ask for when doing translation (word for word)?

Does it make any difference if the langauges involved are somewhat specialized eg English- Slovak?

Thanks,
Rory

[freeier]

depends on what kind of material, what kind of usage.
i'd think for really exotic languages u can charge slightly more.
i used to charge 150hkd for 200 english words. japanese to english translation. usually quite technical documents.

[Rory]

It would be fairly straightforward language (colloquial) it is also a very large body of work 100 pages +

should I offer them a bulk deal do translators do promotions, ala buy 10 words get one free?

[freeier]

ya. long documents usually u charge like 30% lesser. depends on duration of job as well.
i think they will want u to quote a fixed rate. estimate by pages and take abit of mismatch risk.

[wongsg2005]

I have been working as a freelance translator for a very small translation firm for many years. They pay me about 50 cents per(Chinese) word, virtually no differentiation for technical contents or not. I think they charge their clients 90 cents or $1per word.

[freeier]

wats the word to word count between chinese and english.

in japanese, 200english words usually end up 400japanese characters.

[wongsg2005]

Word count is simply based on the source document, i.e. only the Chinese words are counted and the translation firm does not care how many English words or phrases are used in the translation.

[freeier]

i know. what i meant is usually the word counts in one language when translated into another will follow quite a regular ratio.. as said, 400 characters in japanese will translate into english 200 words thereabout.

[LittleCamel]

Normally you count the words of the source. At translating you are free to choose building long or brief sentences. That influences the amount of words.

Translating Word for Word (and count as so) does not work properly as every Translator knows.

[freeier]

u can, but its much easier to count it using word count function at the end document. everyone can live with that.

and despite watever u say, it does turn out quite standard. i've done translation for more than 10 years, include publication documents and even legal court case documents, and it has never really go out of the scope.. maybe +-10%. go do a count and u'd be surprised how things work... for that matter of fact, i did not came up with the formula.. the agent that handles all my jobs have been a professional interpretor and translator for maybe 20 over years and it came from her experience.

a person can try to lengthen the result but there's only so much u can lengthen.. and end of the day u do that once people will not want to buy your service anymore.