This page generally explains how I calculate translation fees.
For a fee estimate of a specific document(s), please contact me using the Contact Form.
How to Calculate Translation Fees
In case of English to Japanese translation, the basic fee will be calculated by:
# of words (source English document) x per-word rate
However, the following factors will add to the increase of the final translation fee:
- Super urgent request: within 24 hours in case of a 3,000 word-file
- Urgent request: within 3 days in case of a 3,000 word-file
- PowerPoint/Excel files
- Poor-resolution PDF files (I found an interesting article about why PDF files become blurry)
- Word files that appear to have been converted from PDF, PowerPoint, or Excel files, and have some formatting or readability issues
- Handwritten notes
Other Matters to Note
The standard calculation method as mentioned above is to use the number of words of a source English document, but if it is extremely hard to calculate or calculating so would make the word count inaccurate due to the file format, the number of Japanese characters of a translated Japanese document will be used. In that case, the estimated fee will only be a rough figure and the final translation fee will be different from the estimate.
Further, my native language is Japanese and I mostly translate English documents into Japanese. However, if it is required, I will translate Japanese documents into English. In such case, the calculation is based on the number of Japanese characters of a source Japanese document and per-character rate. It should be noted that the per-character rate is totally different from the per-word rate simply because the these are different languages.
Finally, per-word and per-character rates are usually in yen, but if it is preferred, U.S. dollar may be used.