When you translate from English to another language, there are almost always more words in the other language. English is extremely compact. Take Spanish for example. A sentence translated into Spanish will expand by perhaps 25%. Of course this figure is just estimated: the style and subject of the material has a profound effect upon its expandability.

Here is one example, where the language increases in length during the translation process:

Clockwise = 1 word in English
En el sentido de las agujas del reloj = 8 words in Spanish

There are also a few languages which expand when going
into English, for instance Finnish, Hebrew (sometimes) and German.

If you have a specific layout in the English document you want to duplicate, you will have to account for the expansion factor.

Firstly, start with a generous amount of white space in English, which will be correspondingly diminished in the translated version.

Secondly, reduce margins and font sizes, steal white space from column gutters and graphical elements, or, as a last resort, expand the amount of paper used.

Translations are always estimated per source word initially. Expansion, therefore, has an effect upon the total cost of the translation. For example, this is true in relation to Roman languages. With non-roman languages, e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Laotian and Thai, it is difficult to determine expansion because in many of these languages there are no “words” in that sense but, rather, symbols.
These languages tend to be character based rather than word based.

You will be paying for the target language, i.e. how many words your original document translates into. Some languages increase in length and others do not, which is why we always charge you on the computer generated final word count. This is a translation industry standard procedure, but it is also the most accurate way of ensuring that you are paying for exactly what has been translated.

Some Latin languages can expand by up to 25% or more, so it is important to bear this in mind at the estimate stage. As mentioned before, it is also important to bear this in mind if you are typesetting the document, as the translation may take up more pages, or more space in layout terms.

It is, therefore, very likely that the invoice will be higher than the estimate. However, on languages that do not increase, for example, Danish, Finnish and German, prices will remain as per the original estimate.

We can, if you request it, provide a fixed price quote, which will take into account the likely expansion rate of the language in question, so that you know the document will cost “no more than X amount.”

You must request this at the estimate stage, as all estimates are done initially on the source word count, with the caveat that there is likely to be word expansion and that the invoice will differ from the estimate.