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Off topic: College Translation Student has Questions
Thread poster: Student2
Student2
Student2
English
May 4, 2003

I am doing a project for my translation class. I was trying to get an estimate of the time it would take to localize a website of about 73,000 words into French, Spanish, and German. I am writing up an imaginary contract and I was wondering if I could get any advice as to what percent of the cost would I charge if the client cancelled? Within how many days of getting the project could the client as for revisions? If anyone could give me advice, I would appreciate it!!
 
Kevin Fulton
Kevin Fulton  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 09:52
German to English
There are a lot of variables here May 5, 2003

Lets assume that you have only 1 translator per language and 1 revisor per language. Assume further that a reasonable daily output would be around 2500 words/day for the translator, and about 12,000 words/day for the revisor (including checking html codes, etc). Your revisor would start a few days after the translator began translating, rather than editing the web pages all at once, but then the revisor would check the final document for consistency once the project was translated. This might be... See more
Lets assume that you have only 1 translator per language and 1 revisor per language. Assume further that a reasonable daily output would be around 2500 words/day for the translator, and about 12,000 words/day for the revisor (including checking html codes, etc). Your revisor would start a few days after the translator began translating, rather than editing the web pages all at once, but then the revisor would check the final document for consistency once the project was translated. This might be as much as 36 working days after the start of the project (assuming about 30 days for the translation), since all the links would have to be tested on top of the formatting aspects of the html. Increasing the number of translators per language would reduce the time, but would increase the amount of post editing to ensure consistency.



The cancellation fee would depend upon several factors, for instance how far in advance the contract was cancelled. If the client cancelled several weeks in advance, you\'d be hard pressed to make a case for more than a nominal fee. A week in advance might justify a somewhat larger fee to compensate the translators for reserving their time (assuming the best of all possible worlds in which translators are given a little respect). Cancellation on the starting date, in my *opinion* would require a fee equivalent to a couple of days output for all translators involved. 73K words is not exactly a small job, and clients should not act capriciously and get away with it.



But again, this is just an opinion, and surely others might disagree with this.

Kevin Fulton ▲ Collapse
 


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