This website helps translators convert word to line prices and vice versa. Charging per line is common practice in Germany, where a standard line (or "Normzeile") is assumed to be 55 characters including spaces. Line prices may sound complicated and strange to translators used to charging per word, but for many languages this is actually a better and fairer way to estimate the amount of translation work involved. German words, for example, tend to be longer than English words and Finnish words are even longer still. Many agencies and clients outside Germay, however, still use word counts to estimate their prices. And that's where this conversion tool might come in handy!
I made the Translator's Converter as a weekend side project and I'd love to get feedback from fellow translators. What features are still missing? Are the results accurate for languages other than the ones I speak (Dutch, German & English)? I'm also specifically looking for the number of characters per word (including spaces) for different kinds of texts (e.g. legal, technical, financial and marketing texts). Feel free to contact me on Twitter or via email.
The default values for word and line rates are from the German Justizvergütungs- und -entschädigungsgesetz (JVEG):
Das Honorar für eine Übersetzung beträgt 1,55 Euro für jeweils angefangene 55 Anschläge des schriftlichen Textes (Grundhonorar). Bei nicht elektronisch zur Verfügung gestellten editierbaren Texten erhöht sich das Honorar auf 1,75 Euro für jeweils angefangene 55 Anschläge (erhöhtes Honorar). Ist die Übersetzung wegen der besonderen Umstände des Einzelfalls [...] besonders erschwert, beträgt das Grundhonorar 1,85 Euro und das erhöhte Honorar 2,05 Euro. Maßgebend für die Anzahl der Anschläge ist der Text in der Zielsprache; [...]. [Wikipedia]
The default values for characters per line/page and words per day are based on my own experience and may vary greatly per subject and translator. Those values can be changed in the Settings tab and these changes will be saved in your browser (using a cookie).
Word to Line Rates - Useful tool for German translators who often charge per line http://t.co/GtwYso9EIo #xl8
— Alessandra Vita (@AVInterpreter) 14 oktober 2015
Word to Line Rates: useful conversion tool for translators http://t.co/gd5IV1rK2k #business #xl8
— Giorgia Garavini (@GioGaravini) 16 oktober 2015
My awesome colleague @vnglst created a word to line price converter - so handy to have for the German market! http://t.co/L20jsT6IX6 #xl8
— Leonie Wagener (@l_wagener) 1 december 2014
Awesome tool for #translators! Word to line #rate converter! http://t.co/tKHdeKpKwY
— Martina@MovingWords (@mrMovingWords) 14 oktober 2015