Translation Prices – Up or Down?

Good news for translations, the market for outsourced language services is growing at an annual rate of more than 12%, and is currently worth over 31 billion dollars, according to Common Sense Advisory. Despite the growth in demand the prices are dropping.

Translation prices

According to the research made by Common Sense Advisory the average per-word translation prices into and from the 30 most commonly used languages on the web has fallen over 30% since 2010 and over 40% since 2008. However, the study also finds that some of the most popular individual language pairs, such as Spanish into English, have increased in price.

So what are the reasons for the decrease this research is stating?

Some believe is globalization. Competing with low cost language providers makes larger translation companies review their pricing. Some say that machine translation and crowd sourcing are the cause. Companies have no need for translators since they can simply use a bilingual employee to recheck a machine translation. Others say that it is because of the hard negotiation of more aggressive buyers. The recession has made companies and corporations be more careful with the money they spend.

The biggest concern is that competing with low cost providers or using machine translation will affect the quality of language services and translation prices. Another interesting fact is that the changes in pricing may be influenced by the fact that per word prices do not include services like editing or proofreading or by the fluctuation of exchange rates.

Yet, neither the language service market nor clients have actually stated that quality is gradually decreasing. Most believe that the situations in which machine translations are used are quite different from those in which professional translation companies are required.

Although translation prices are a bit higher than free machine translation, you should always turn to a translation company for your business communications. Feel free to contact us for any request at [email protected] 24 hours a day.

Translation Prices

Translation is a crucial part of business globalization. A thicket of technology, business systems, regulatory agreement, and marketing issues play themselves out in complex sequences, but translation always continues at the center. So the question “What does translation service cost?” is both a right starting point and one of the common questions that clients ask us. For this report, we examined nearly three hundred language service providers on their prices for translating documents in six dozen language combinations, to and from English.

Previously, the translation prices have been very stable. We saw this in May 2010 when we compared rates than with the historical record from 10 years prior. Last year, we observed a similar range of prices in comparison to 2010. In the previous two decades, even with the current global economic downturn, prices have increased. This reviews the state of pricing and the tactics that buyers use to lower the costs they pay for translation services.