Frequently Asked Questions

Just as a short back and sides is unlikely to take your hairdresser the same amount of time or cost as much as a complicated fade, no two translation projects are alike. How long a document will take to translate will depend on the field it covers — a patient-facing clinical trial information sheet written using layman's terms will in all likelihood take much less time to translate and proofread than a protocol synopsis summarising clinical trial information for physicians, for example.

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As for the cost; translation and proofreading projects are usually invoiced on a per-word basis, while formatting tasks are usually invoiced by the hour, and subtitling tasks are tallied up based on the length of the video in minutes. The rates for all of these vary by sector, so please feel free to get in touch with us to discuss your project and for a free, no-obligation quote.

When we receive a document for translation, we process it using our Computer-Aided Translation (CAT)  software. This software uses our database of bilingual sentences to find similar phrases or terms within your document. If it finds two identical sentences in your document, these are called repetitions, and if it finds sentences containing terms or phrases that match with some in our database, these are called fuzzy matches. When we generate our quote, we offer a 33% discount on all fuzzy matches, and a 66% discount on repetitions (although they match sentences in our database, we still need to review these repetitions, as the context of the sentence is likely to be different).

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Please note that these discounts only apply to Translation projects - when proofreading, the entire text needs to be treated identically, to make sure we don't miss anything!

There are three steps to subtitling: transcription, timecoding and translation.

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Transcription involves creating a written version of something said aloud. It must always be done by a native speaker of the language spoken in the video. Otherwise, the audio quality, pronunciation and any accents found in the video may mean the transcriber is unable to understand the audio in its entirety. For example, a video in French must be transcribed by a native French speaker who is preferably from the same country as the people in the video (that is, ideally a video from Belgium will be transcribed by a Belgian French-speaker, rather than a French speaker from France).

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Timecoding, as its name suggests, consists of adding "time codes" to the transcription to separate it into smaller parts that are then aligned with the video. This step should also ideally be carried out by someone with the same native language as the one used in the video.

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Lastly, this time-coded transcription is then sent to the translator, who translates it into the requested language. It is essential that an experienced subtitler performs this step of the process, as they will need to follow the strict standards involved in subtitling, including taking into account how long each subtitle will take to read, the framerate of the video and character limits. This helps to ensure that your viewers will have enough time to read and fully understand each subtitle.