Translation Costs and Approaches

At Capital Captions, we work with video translation on a regular basis and offer highly competitive prices. In this guide we’ll be looking at translation costs and approaches and how that affects your pricing and quotes.

One key issue when it comes to starting a translation project is getting a quote from your chosen company. Many companies offer per video minute rates on foreign subtitling and/or translation, but at Capital Captions, we favour per word translations. In this blog, we’ll cover what the differences are between the two options, translation costs and approaches and which might work best for you.

Video Translation – Per Video Minute

Typically starting at £15.00 per video minute, the ‘per video minute’ option for translating your video means that you pay for translation on each minute of your video’s duration.

Pros

Paying for translations services on a per video minute you can confirm a final cost for your translation project prior to going ahead, so the costs are set. Regardless of there being minutes of constant rapid speech or silence, the price you pay will be the same. Having a wordy video is not going to mean escalating costs.

Cons

Quotes for translations on a per video minute basis often seem lower cost than per word estimates at the budgeting stage because the ‘per word’ model means quoting based on high estimates, rather than a set cost. However, if your video has a lot of silence and/or musical sequences that don’t need translation, you are paying for those empty minutes and your final cost may actually be higher than the alternative ‘per word’ estimates.

Video Translation – Per Word

Translating on a per word basis means that source language transcription needs to take place prior to a final quote being given for translation. Translations at Capital Captions start at a rate of £0.12 per word for European language, going up to £0.14 per word for many Asian languages such as Japanese and Chinese, and £0.16 per word for Arabic and less commonly requested languages.

Pros

Per word translations tend to be both superior in terms of the final results and also the fairness of the costing structure. When you work with per word translation, you are only paying for the work that is done by the translator, rather than empty minutes of music, silence or even five to ten minutes of end credits! Though per word quotes often seem high at the quoting stage, it’s highly unusual for costs to even reach the high estimate of 150wpm, let alone exceed it. In some cases, final costs can be as little as half of the budget. Fair on the translator, fair on the client and in the end, everyone is happy.

Cons

Per word translations can feel like a gamble. Needing to work on source language transcription first means that you will be unaware of the full cost of your video translations until the job is at least partially complete. This uncertainty can make it hard to budget.

Conclusion

At Capital Captions, we would usually recommend working with per word translations because they cover only the work that’s done – no more and no less. Videos with incessant fast speech mean more work for translators, and so mean they are paid the required rate. Videos with hardly any speech are hardly any work for translators, and again, the final cost will reflect that and the client pays an appropriate rate.

From a captioning and translation company’s perspective, per word translations are usually more accurate and overall, more cost effective, but if you have a budget that needs to be confirmed prior to going ahead and the maximum capped rate on per word translations is too high, working per video minute may be the option for you.

So there you have it, our quick guide to translation costs and approaches. If you have a translation project which you would like to get a quote for then hit the button below to get your quote.