A Guide to Saving Money on Translation

Like many professional services, translation can be an expensive one – especially if you have frequent requirements. We’ve compiled this straightforward advice on ways to keep costs at a minimum:

Avoid minimum charges

If you regularly have very small projects – less than 300 words, for example – try and group them together to remove the impact of minimum charges. If you have a lot of very small projects, let us know. We may be able to find a more cost-effective solution.

Take advantage of volume discounting

We offer our clients discounts on high-volume translation projects… usually where the word counts are in excess of 25,000 words for each language. If you have a number of projects that collectively add up to a large volume, why not request them all at the same time?

Get us involved at the early stages

If you’re planning a big project or are aware of a large translation need in the future, get us involved early on. By knowing in advance about large projects, not only can we ensure we have the right linguists available, we can also advise on the most efficient and cost-effective approach regarding your translation.

Time-saving tips

Document formatting

If something is in a difficult or non-standard format, let us know before spending lots of time formatting it for translation. We may be able to translate and edit files directly without you needing to prepare them… often at no extra cost.

Make use of available systems

It is possible to reduce administration by using our online ordering system. If you have regular requests and want to keep track of them, or project requests from your organisation are currently channelled through one point of contact, our online system gives each person a login and full transparency for your organisation. It’s free too!

A final word

Hopefully the above advice will help you to be mindful of opportunities to reduce your expenditure on translation. We also endeavour to keep costs down for you by developing client-specific translation memories, adopting industry-leading software to make the human translation process more efficient, consistent and cost effective, and giving clients free access to time-saving online order systems.

High-quality professional translation will always be an expensive service, but the costs far outweigh the pitfalls of using low-quality/inexperienced translators or automatic machine translation tools.