Technical Translation Cost and Rates

How technical translation cost is calculated

We price by the source word. Your document goes through a translation tool analysis that counts every word in the file, separates repeated segments, and compares the text against any translation memory we already hold for you. That analysis produces a number before a single sentence is translated, which is why the figure on your quote is the figure on your invoice.

Pricing per page exists in this industry, and we avoid it. A page of a wiring schematic and a page of a warranty statement have nothing in common: one holds 80 words in a title block, the other holds 600. Word counts are auditable. You can run the same count in Word and get roughly what we got, minus the repetition analysis.

Five variables move the number, and they interact. A German patent specification due Friday in scanned PDF form sits at the top of every range on this page. A Spanish work instruction in clean DOCX with a two-week schedule sits near the bottom. Most projects land somewhere between, and the six stages a project passes through stay the same either way.

Technical translation rates by language group

The ranges below are what we typically quote for technical content into these languages, per source word, including independent revision. They are indicative. Your quote may differ once we see the actual files, and we would rather show you real numbers now than hide behind "contact us for pricing."

Language group	Typical range per source word	What sets the position in the range
Spanish, French, Portuguese (BR), Italian	$0.14 – $0.22	Deep pool of engineer-translators. Regulated content and CAD work sit at the top.
Polish, Czech, Russian, Romanian, Turkish	$0.15 – $0.24	Good availability, thinner in narrow specialties like semiconductor process.
German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish	$0.16 – $0.26	Higher cost of living in the target markets. Finnish and Norwegian run above German.
Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Vietnamese	$0.17 – $0.28	Right-to-left handling and script engineering add production time on formatted files.
Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese, Korean	$0.18 – $0.30	Small population of translators with both an engineering background and certification.
Low-resource and rare pairs	Quoted per project	Availability decides. We tell you honestly if a pair will take longer to staff.

Translation out of a foreign language into English usually costs slightly less than the reverse for the European pairs and slightly more for Japanese and Korean, where source comprehension is the scarce skill. Rates for the individual pairs we cover are discussed on each language page, alongside the variants we handle and the specialists assigned to them.

What raises a quote and what lowers it

Two documents of identical length can be quoted 60 percent apart. Here is what accounts for the gap.

Factor	Lowers your price	Raises your price
File format	Editable DOCX, XLSX, IDML, XLIFF, well-structured XML	Scanned PDF needing OCR, text baked into images, DWG title blocks
Subject difficulty	Product descriptions, packing lists, general operating text	Patent claims, regulatory dossiers, chemical safety data, PLC logic comments
Schedule	Standard throughput of 2,000 to 2,500 words per translator per day	Weekend work, overnight turnaround, splitting across parallel teams
Prior material	Existing translation memory, approved glossary, previous versions	First project with no reference material and no terminology decisions made
Volume	Large or recurring programs, where setup is amortized	One-off jobs below the minimum charge
Deliverable	Bilingual file or clean text back in the source format	Print-ready layout, regenerated indexes, redrawn figures

The single biggest lever is the one clients rarely think about: sending the editable source instead of the PDF someone exported from it. Recovering a usable file from a locked PDF can add hours of production work to a job that would otherwise have been pure translation.

Repetitions and translation memory: what you stop paying for

Technical documentation repeats itself, and you should not pay full price for text we have already translated for you. Every project we run builds a translation memory that stays yours. On the next revision of the same manual, the analysis reports how much of the file matches what is already stored, and the discount applies automatically.

Match type	What it means	Typical share of the full rate
Context match	Identical segment, identical surrounding text	15% to 25%
100% match	Identical segment already in your memory	25% to 35%
Repetition inside the file	Same sentence appearing several times in the new document	25% to 35%
Fuzzy match 85% to 99%	Close to a stored segment, needs editing	50% to 70%
Fuzzy match 75% to 84%	Loosely similar, often faster to retranslate	75% to 90%
New words	No usable precedent	100%

What this looks like in practice: a 96-page press manual translated last year, updated with a new guarding section and revised torque tables, came back from analysis at 71 percent reusable. The second edition was billed at roughly 40 percent of the first. That is the normal pattern for manuals that get reissued every product cycle, and it is the main reason we keep memories clean rather than treating them as a sales gimmick.

One caveat we state on every quote: matched segments are still read and checked in context by the reviser. A 100% match that was correct in chapter 3 can be wrong in chapter 9 when the surrounding procedure changed. Paying 30 percent for that verification is cheaper than discovering it in the field.

Costs quoted separately from the word rate

These appear as their own lines when they apply, and only when you ask for them.

• Desktop publishing: $45 to $75 per hour depending on the software and the state of the file. Rebuilding an InDesign manual after German text expansion is slower than adjusting a two-page datasheet. Scope and typical hours are described under our DTP service.
• File engineering: OCR of scanned documents, extraction of text from CAD drawings, and rebuilding non-editable tables are billed hourly at the same rate. We quote this after looking at the files, never as a blind estimate.
• Certificate of accuracy: included at no charge on any project we translate. If you need notarization, we pass through the notary fee at cost.
• Terminology work: building a validated termbase for a first project usually takes 3 to 8 hours, billed hourly. Maintaining it afterward is included in your word rate.
• Rush handling: a surcharge of 20 to 35 percent when a deadline requires evening, weekend, or parallel-team work. Details on how we staff those jobs are on the expedited turnaround page. Plenty of urgent requests fit inside standard capacity and carry no surcharge at all; we say so rather than charging for the word "urgent."

What is always included in the rate

The per-word price on your quote is not a translation-only price. It covers the full production chain:

• Translation by a certified specialist working into their native language, chosen for your sector before your language pair.
• Independent revision by a second linguist against the source, which is the step most low-cost offers quietly remove. What each stage checks is documented in our quality assurance process.
• Automated QA checks on numbers, units, tags, placeholders, and terminology consistency.
• A project manager who answers your emails and routes translator queries to the right person on your side.
• Translation memory and termbase maintenance, delivered to you on request at any time.
• Correction of any genuine translation error at no charge, with no time limit tied to invoicing.

Where a client wants a lower price on high-volume internal content, we discuss machine translation with human post-editing openly, price it lower, and label it as what it is. We will not sell post-edited output as human translation at the human rate, which is a common practice we have seen on documents that ended up on shop floors.

Why the cheapest technical translation is rarely the cheapest

Take a 60,000-word maintenance manual. At $0.09 per word from a vendor with no revision step, you save about $4,800 against a properly staffed quote. Now count what a single mistranslated lubrication interval costs: a distributor hotline fielding calls for six months, a service team retrained on the correct procedure, 2,000 printed manuals pulped and reprinted, and a warranty claim on a gearbox that failed early. We have been called in to fix documents in exactly that state, and the remediation translation costs more than the original would have, because someone has to reconcile the bad target text against the source line by line before anything can be rewritten.

Safety content raises the stakes further. OSHA hazard communication rules expect workers to understand the chemical information at their workstation. A safety data sheet where an H-phrase drifted from the standardized GHS wording is not a stylistic problem; it is a finding waiting for an inspector. Cost comparisons that ignore this are comparing two different products.

Minimum charge and small jobs

Our minimum is $75 per language. That covers short items like a two-page datasheet, a set of machine labels, a revised warning plate, or a single-page letter of conformity. Small jobs get the same treatment as large ones: a specialist translator, a second linguist revising, and QA checks before delivery. A number of long-running accounts started with a $75 order that someone used as a test.

For recurring small volumes, we set up a monthly account so you are not quoted, invoiced, and paid on every 300-word update. Clients with frequent short documents usually find this cheaper than the minimum charge applied repeatedly.

Getting an exact figure for your project

Estimating from a page count gets you within about 40 percent, which is fine for a first budget conversation and useless for a purchase order. To quote precisely we need the files themselves, the target languages and variants, your deadline, and what the finished document has to do: internal reference, shipped with the product, filed with a regulator. That last point changes the amount of checking involved, and it changes the price.

If you are comparing several vendors, ask each of them for the same breakdown: word count, match analysis, whether independent revision is included, and what the layout work costs. Quotes that arrive as one lump sum are hiding at least one of those four. Ours never are.