Simple translations

In the translating business, text lenght is calculated using what is called a standard page (SP). The term standard page means 30 lines of 60 keystrokes, i.e. 1800 characters including spaces.

Our agency uses only professional translators. We do not use automatic translating programs that are only an imperfect aide at their current level of development. This means that translating is work done by people, and that requires time. Translating one standard page usually takes one hour of work, depending on the difficulty of the text. The standard workload per day is therefore 8 standard pages of text.

If the length of text you want translated is 40 standard pages, you need to allow for ca. 5 workdays for the actual translating. You must also always add 2 extra days. One extra day is reserved for our agency to receive the text from you and to choose the appropriate translator, and we need the second extra day to receive the finished translation from the translator, to check the text and to deliver it to you. Therefore, the total time required for delivery of the text in question would be 7 workdays.

If you need your translation in a hurry, you can place an express order.

Depending on the kind of text and its length, we can do translations as quickly as possible. This, however, involves time pressure and work under difficult conditions, so the cost is higher. For express translations due within 24 hours of receipt of the order, we add a 100% surcharge to the price for which the translated would have been delivered within a usual deadline. For translations due within 48 hours we add a 50% surcharge. We follow the same procedure for large orders if the requested deadline would require the translating of more than 8 standard pages per day.

Our agency's goal is to provide the best possible translations. This means the translation must contain no spelling, grammatical or lexicographical errors or other deficiencies and and must match the content and style of the original text. We succeed in satisfying these criteria for the vast majority of texts, but there are texts that require the client's coope­ration in order to assure the achieving of the best quality. This usually involves complying with a company's language standards, expert terminology in specific fields, etc. In those cases, we ask that clients provide their firm's terminology, glossaries or contact to a consultant.

An important aspect of our agency's work is what we know about the translators who work for us, and we use that knowledge when assigning particular translators to specific jobs. Our translators have university degrees in linguistics or are experts in given fields and have gained their language skills in a diffent manner. In both cases, these are translators we have tested who have proven themselves in their professional practice.

The decisive principle for translating is translation exclusively into the native language. For example, tranlations into English are done only by translators whose native language is English.

If, however, a text requires expert knowlege of circumstances in the Czech Republic or if the text to be translated emphasizes highly technical terminology over stylistic considerations, it will probably be translated by a translator whose native language is Czech. For texts of this kind, a native speaker of the target language performs the final linguistic editing.

Every text is unique, and the time needed for translations can vary. For routine translations, a standard page can be expected to take about one hour. There are, however, texts that can take as much as twice that long. This may be caused by a high frequency of technical terminology, poor quality of the original text, lack of clarity, poor legibility, complicated formatting, insertion of the translation into the original format etc. In such cases we add a surcharge for the difficulty of the text to the basic rate in the price list. The surcharge for difficulty may be up to 50%.

If you send us a text in a format other than MS Word (i.e. xls, pdf, ppt, jpg, tif, hard copy etc.), we add a 20% formatting surcharge.

Besides page breaks, text formatting, creating headers and footers and inserting tables and graphs, the processing of graphics also includes editing pictures (scanning, transcribing text, insertion into a formatted publication).