Buying content on a word rate incentivises suppliers to sell more words than are needed, regardless of their commercial impact. Word rates work well for high-volume, repetitive or standardised content such as product copy, legal text and returns information.
They fall down for work that depends on research and judgement, such as SEO keyword mapping and paid and organic media copy. The guide argues that this work is better priced by time or output, for example URLs optimised per hour.
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High volumes spread across many languages do not reduce costs, because each language needs its own specialists.
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Rates broadly map to relative GDP and linguist scarcity, so Nordic markets cost suppliers significantly more to serve than Latin America.
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Translation memory discounts repeated text. Make sure costs are calculated on the weighted word count, and that you own your translation memory.
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Human post-editing can outweigh the savings, especially in smaller languages with less training data. Ask for sample output and agree the editing level first.
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Six methods, from machine translation with post-editing to translation, localisation, transcreation, origination and copywriting, rise in quality, cost and time.
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Beyond spelling and grammar, the ultimate quality measure is customer engagement: click-through, conversions, bounce rate and video drop-off.
The guide recommends moving from simplistic word rates to models such as retainers with rate cards that can be monitored in real time, and retaining an expert team rather than buying project by project. Written in February 2021, before large language models reshaped machine translation, its advice on pricing, ownership and quality still applies.
Read the guideExplore our localisation planning and AI localisation and post-editing services.
Why fragmented, market-by-market adaptation is no longer sustainable, and what a centralised creative adaptation system does differently. By Simon Ambrose and Jimena Ortega.
How to scale multilingual content across markets and channels without losing quality or control: four learnings from performance marketing. By Lindsay Hong.
How multilingual competence is acquired, assessed and applied, and why native-speaker status alone doesn’t guarantee excellent language production. By Hannes Ben.
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