With the latest software tools and lean overheads, BERLUKAS can offer competitive prices.

Furthermore, to eliminate all risks of errors and provide a guaranteed price before any work begins, all our prices are established for each project following a detailed analysis of all the documents to be translated.

Once agreed with the client, prices will never change unless a significant change to the project scope is requested in written by the client. Send us your documents for a free evaluation using the Quotes page of this website.

10 Tips

Price alone is a poor indicator of a good translation deal. Considering the overall translation costs and spending the right money up front is much wiser than buying on the cheapest price per word and fixing the problems later. If you need to operate on a tight budget, consider the following tips:

1. Source File Format – Documents not requiring specialized software (e.g. Tag Editor, AutoCAD, etc.) or conversion to MS Word are less expensive to translate. Digitized PDF documents , for example, must be converted before translation, which requires intensive correction and formatting work; this alone can increase project prices by up to 20%. Therefore, we recommend that our clients find the Word version of PDF documents when available.



2. Source Text Format – Tables, graphics and other unusual text features all add up to DTP (DeskTop Publishing) costs. Translation software works best with simple, straightforward paragraphs.



3. Degree of Technical Difficulty – Highly technical documents are of course more expensive to translate than general or common documents, because they require more experienced and expensive translators.



4. Quality of the Source Text – It happens that documents submitted for translation are full of errors or quite simply, poorly written. Before translation, these imperfections must be corrected; sometimes, the client has to be consulted and has to approve the modifications to the source document. A well written text will always be less expensive to translate.



5. Subject to translate – A computer program full of codes and symbols can be easy to translate, but the degree of accuracy needed and the length or scarcity of the "words" often justify a higher rate than a simple text, otherwise the translator might as well take a job flipping burgers - it would be more profitable!



6. Document length – It goes without saying that a translation project extending over several weeks or even month is more attractive, therefore less expensive per word than a rush request for a half-page translation to be delivered in two hours!



7. Language pair – Rates vary from one language to another, the law of supply and demand being in force here as everywhere else.



8. Degree of similarity with previous translations – Translation memory analysis tools can quickly determine the number of segment having some similarity with previous translations. Time savings can result from substantial similarities.



9. Repetitions – If segments are repeated in the same project, the translation could be done faster and lower prices could result.



10. Accuracy level required – If you only need the "gist" of a text, a Machine Translation will probably save you lots of time and money. Specify so when asking for a quote.

Some useful data...

• A normal page of text averages 300 to 500 words
• A translator can translate between 1500 and 3000 words per day
• MS Word is often used to count words, but it does not count words in text blocks, images or headers/footers
• Image-based PDF documents first need to be converted to MS Word before word count and translation
• Words in character-based PDF documents can be counted without conversion, using specialized software such as AnyCount.