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Video Mar 05, 2019

Exploring the Actual Cost of Website Translation

Most website translation vendors love to talk about their low-cost translation rates. This kind of “bargain basement” pricing is popular in the industry because it appears to save customers money.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t. It’s often actually intended to distract you from the true costs of translation.

Low Prices, Hidden Fees

Low translation rates usually cost more in the long run. Here’s why:

Many vendors’ low “price per word” translation rates exclude critical editorial steps like proofreading and revisions. Those are done at an additional cost and are usually billed as separate line items.

Vendors also charge their customers ongoing project management and consultation fees. These costs all wind up in the monthly invoice.

Learn other practices vendors may use to maximize your website translation costs.

Website localization costs are highly influenced by the total number of words that a vendor must translate. But most vendors never provide that total word count when they discuss pricing with customers. Instead, they simply present that same low price-per-word translation rate as an enticement to buy.

Let me explain why this might deceive customers. Many websites have key sentences and phrases that appear across many web pages. They can be re-used hundreds, or even thousands of times. Most translation 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.

Learn more about translatable ‘text segments,’ and how they inform translation pricing.

MotionPoint’s All-Inclusive Pricing

We include quality assurance, editorial oversight and project management in our translation pricing.

Our technology also detects all translatable content on your website including phrases that repeat hundreds or thousands of times. This means that the scope of work for your translation project is much smaller than with other approaches.

Your translation costs are much lower, too. With MotionPoint’s solution, linguists translate this repeating content only once. And you pay only once to translate it.

MotionPoint doesn’t hide the full cost of translation with too-good-to-be-true pricing schemes. We believe pricing should be transparent and fair, so you can successfully communicate—and sell—in global markets.

Learn more about MotionPoint’s fair, transparent website translation pricing approach.