When it comes to translating your customer portals and secure login areas for multilingual users, it’s critical to choose a solution that minimizes translation costs on an ongoing basis.
This is more challenging than it sounds. In the website and portal translation industry, vendors often use a “price-per-word” pricing model to estimate project costs. Per-word costs are usually determined by:
- The languages needed for a project
- The number of linguists available to translate in those languages
- The number of translatable words within the project’s scope
This traditional pricing scheme might appear fair at first glance, but most translation vendors optimize it in ways that benefit their business interests, not their customers’. This can create hidden risks and costs for their customers.
Here’s a crash course on the pricing tactics many vendors use as they provide project pricing—and how MotionPoint’s own pricing model is clear, transparent, fair … and better.
Hidden Translation Costs
It’s common knowledge that translation vendors shave pennies off their per-word rates to compete on price. What’s far less known is most of them make up revenue losses by charging extra for editorial review, revisions, QA and project management.
These tasks are often buried in invoices as separate line items, cleverly obscuring the true cost of translation. Some vendors also charge ongoing project management and consultation fees.
When combined, the results often create sticker shock.
Subpar Translation Quality
Also in exchange for low price-per-word translation rates, vendors may employ inexperienced translators. Revising those sloppy translations—and the problems they can wreak with a localized portal’s UX—often end up costing more than if a more reputable vendor was selected in the first place.
Withholding Critical Information
Most vendors never provide a total word count for a project when they discuss pricing with customers. Instead, they simply reiterate the same low price-per-word translation rate as an enticement to buy.
This can deceive customers. Many portals and login areas have key sentences and phrases that appear across many web pages. They can be re-used hundreds, or even thousands of times. Most vendors include all of this repeating content in their scope of work.
So even at a low price-per-word, the cost of localizing this tremendous workload becomes incredibly high. And since vendors don’t present this total word count when they discuss pricing, customers never know the actual cost of the project.
Technological Shortcomings
Also, website translation is a unique beast. Translatable content resides in webpages, videos, images, and complex applications. Undercooked translation technologies do a bad job of detecting this content, resulting in low—and very inaccurate—word count estimates.
Many portals use single-page applications and dynamic content to deliver personalized information to users. These pose major challenges for most vendors.
Single-Page Applications
These applications are often powered by Angular, React and other frameworks. Within the context of portal localization projects, it’s extremely challenging to identify and export translatable text from these applications while also preserving their JavaScript framework logic.
If vendors can localize this content at all, they often mistakenly translate the application’s code (which wrecks the app) or only partially translate its text (which delivers a lousy “mixed language” UX).
Dynamic Content
Many portals leverage AJAX calls that produce dynamic content that would not be seen “on the page” by a user. Most vendors don’t have the sophisticated JSON and XML parsers to find this content. The also often results in an alienating “mixed language” UX.
MotionPoint’s Superior Approach
Like other vendors, MotionPoint charges a per-word rate for translation—but our transparent approach delivers far more value.
All-Inclusive Pricing
Our differentiator is that we deliver world-class translations within an all-inclusive price. MotionPoint includes quality assurance, editorial oversight, project management and more in our price-per-word rates.
The translation price you see is the price you get. No unexpected upcharges, no hidden fees.
Industry Leading Technology
MotionPoint uses the most sophisticated scoping technology in the industry, enabling us to give customers accurate word-count estimates for the scope of work.
Our superior content-parsing technology properly analyzes webpages, multimedia (including digital PDF documents) and notoriously challenging single-page applications and dynamic content.
Our pricing estimates also account for the word repetition described above, in which key phrases are used throughout a portal. Our technology enables us to translate these phrases only once, and those translations are used throughout the portal at no additional cost to our customers—no matter how many times they appear on-site.
This greatly reduces translation costs.
Conclusion
When a vendor’s profits hinge almost solely on revenue generated by translation, they’re not motivated to optimize their products to reduce your project’s translatable word count. If anything, they’re inclined to maximize your translation spend, not minimize it.
MotionPoint is different. We never blindside you with lowball quotes, hidden costs or extra fees. Our business model provides continuous cost savings, enabling you to enhance your relationships with multilingual constituents now—and in the future.
Last updated on April 15, 2020
