While per word and per hour fees for translations are known around the world, Germany has two additional invoicing units: per standard line and per standard page. In 2019, I had already published a PDF demonstrating such “standard” page/lines in German. It included an anecdote why “give me a rough estimate” is a notoriously bad idea for texts the translator has not had a chance to see and assess. Now, the topic got back to me when a client asked: “Your competitor has made me a per word offer, but you are calculating per standard line – how am I supposed to compare these?“
How do translators set prices per word / line / page?
Translation pricing is a bizarre world of its own, as most other service providers (attorneys, estate agents, designers, craftsmen, …) are being paid by the hour. Prices per word or per standard line are calculated by using empirical values (read: experience, gut feeling) for how many of those textual units can possibly be translated in one hour, and dividing the hourly fee by this figure.
The hourly fee itself ideally ought to be calculated by dividing the cost of living, social security contributions, taxes, retirement plans, office supplies, a new PC or laptop once every 3-5 years, fun expenses, etc. by the number of productive 8-hour days per year (this can range from <140 to >260 days per year, but will never be 365!). This is called cost-based pricing and often happens with bad translation agencies.
Well, or maths isn’t your cup of tea (boo!) and you’re stuck with looking at what the others take and try to be in that range, too. This is called competition-based pricing – a method that can bring (solo-)entrepreneurs into deep red figures fast; just as the method where you leave it to the client how much they want to pay – this is called demand-oriented pricing and most often happens in the “bottom-feeder translation agency” environment.
You can generally identify experienced professionals by asking them how they fixed their prices, and why they want more money for this job or client than for another job or client.
Where did standard pages and standard lines come from?
When thinking of “translators”, people usually first think of literature translators, this small and romanticized market segment in the language “industry” that never keeps up with industrial or business translation (in terms of volume and income). Literary translators historically have been lumped in with authors, and those have traditionally been paid by publishing houses in Germany by a typical typewriter page, the “Standard Page” of 30 lines × 55 characters, thus 1.650 key strokes, but minus a bit of whitespace to make it a nice, round 1.500 keystrokes per standard page (again, have a look at the example PDF).
At some moment, however, some clever genius noticed that translations could actually be shorter than a full page outside the context of entire books, and voilà! The standard line of 55 keystrokes (including spaces) was born.
In many countries outside of Germany, especially in France, the UK and the US, the almighty publishers took parallel steps to convert those pesky and uncalculable hour-based fees to an “objective” text-based unit “to bring them all, and in the darkness bind” the authors and translators: The per word pricing.
Before the advent of personal computers, words/lines/pages simply were easier to count than characters/keystrokes. Hence, they counted those made-up units. Today, it would be entirely feasible to invoice by character because computers are good at counting even the tiniest of units – but which human would be able to convert “EUR 0.0254 per character” into something resembling a final project price?
While the always correct Germans have fixed a very clear definition of what a “line” is (see above), our international neighbours were less preoccupied with the fact that the average word length differs between languages. A value often cited for the Average Word Length for German is 7½ characters, the renowned Duden dictionary explains ways of counting this. German, however, is a language where we have compound nouns that can become significantly longer (“Aktionärs|versammlungs|einladung” = “invitation (to the) meeting (of) shareholders”), as the DVÜD explains on its German translation blog.
Thus, per word fees are much more palatable for languages that do not build compound words. For the English language, words are, according to Wolfram Alpha, only 5.1 characters on average, while French words have 5.3 characters on average (in this French Young Writers forum, authors cite 6 characters per word, if one counts +1 keystroke for the space or punctuation following each word).
What’s more, the ratio of source text volume to target text volume can differ wildly, as the W3C notes:
“Generally speaking: the shorter the original source text, the longer its translation will be in relation to the original text volume.”
Despite all this, there actually are colleagues who are still invoicing by the hour like other service providers – especially for creative and marketing translations. The argument goes: While technical translators have to stay close to the original text, the so-called “transcreators” rebuild a message from scratch to convey its meaning, its emotions to a culturally different audience, that is, they are in fact writing new texts that are not directly comparable with the originals. This requires extensive research and a creative process which can either be “speed of thought” or very long and cumbersome until the epiphany hits, as explained in “Transcreation“. On the other hand: Even in technical translation, where things must be exact and technically correct, research is a necessity.
For most clients and their experience with service fees in general, an hourly fee can be more easily compared to all those known “per hour” fees, so offering an hourly fee would actually make translators more comparable.
How to compare per word and per standard line prices?
The Average Word Length in German comes in quite handy because dividing 55 characters per standard line by 7.5 characters per word equals nearly 7 words per line (7×7.5=52.5). Likewise, the English and French word lengths of 5.1 and 5.3, respectively, are easy to convert to 11 (English) or 10 (French) words per standard line (5.1×11=56.1 and 5.3×10=53).
For more exact values, use ×7,3 (DE), ×10,78 (EN) and ×10,38 (FR).
At this point, clients also need to know whether a particular translator invoices by source text (the original) or by target text (the translation). From my point of view and from the POV of most clients, invoicing by source text is more transparent: The client sends his text to the translator, who can immediately count the text volume and write his offer.
However, many colleagues are rightly asking why they should be paid for what the client brings them instead of what they themselves have written, their own work. The downside of this approach is: You can only get a very rough estimate on the final price. In the languages I work in, translations are often up to 15% longer or shorter than the original text due to linguistic and grammatical differences: sometimes, there is no direct translation and concepts have to be explained, commented or otherwise put differently; sometimes, syntax (the way sentences can be constructed) just differs; or one language does not have grammatical genders while the other has three to integrate into male, female and neutral nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives – as singular and plural forms.
The bottom line is that depending on the languages involved and which invoicing mode is used, word- or line-based fees may seem vastly different even if the underlying hourly rate is the same!.
Did this clear things up for you, or are you more confused than ever? Would you prefer an hourly rate, just as with other services, or do you like the possiblity to have a fixed price calculation up front? I’m looking forward to your comments!
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