It’s not easy for an outsider to understand what takes time and what costs money in the translation business. Sometimes I get requests to translate very short texts that often have simply been copied and pasted straight into an email. “Could you just translated this?” It’s supposed to happen quickly and the sender seems to think that it should be both simple and cheap.
The truth is that short texts often are difficult and take a lot of time. On the one hand there is no context, on the other the administrative tasks make up a much larger proportion of the job. I often have to call or email the client to ask for reference material och background information in orderto understand the text. It’s not always that easy to know if e.g. “judgement” means a general “opinion” or a more specific “court ruling”, when there is no context.
When the work is completed, I then have to write up an invoice that needs to be sent off to the client and entered in my bookkeeping. If the job in itself had taken twenty hours to perform, then one hour of mailing and shuffling papers wouldn’t be that burdensome, compared to if the job takes half an hour.
One other misconception is that a list of words should be quick and easy to translate. It could be e.g. words that will be used for search engine optimization on a website or words and phrases that will be included in software strings. In this case it’s the lack of context that’s the problem.
If it’s words for seach engine optimization, then I need access to the website to see how these words have been translated previously, and to sit and search for every word takes quite a bit of time. For software strings, I need to know what function they will have. Should e.g. “store” have the function “to keep something in a place” or should it lead to a “shop”?
So even if a text is only three lines, or looks very easy, it could unfortunately take longer to complete than the client might expect. But if you are a potential client, don’t worry: If you contact me, you will of course get a quote with a delivery time and price estimate. There will be no unpleasant surprises.