ABP Translations offers a complete range of services for companies of all sizes and sectors.
Languages
Italian
Spanish
Norwegian
Greek
English
Portuguese
Romanian
Danish
French
Hungarian
Japanese
Bulgarian
German
Chinese
Serbian
Arabic
Russian
Polish
Czech
Turkish
Finnish
Swedish
Slovak
and others...
Translations into all languages of technical manuals, books, magazine articles and websites
Private language lessons
Delivery of print-ready files of translated text with layout in Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Adobe PageMaker and QuarkXPress formats.
Certified translations and legalised documents for Italy and abroad
Interpreters for training courses, company visits, business meetings, round-table discussions and commercial negotiations
Transcriptions from audio and video recordings
Calculation of translation costs
A method of calculation must provide the translator and the customer with an easy system to verify the quantities and the commitment so that quotations are accurate and reliable, leaving no space for the sensation of having paid too much or having earned too little.
Our system accounts for translation quantities based on the characters of the original text, including spaces between words. We use the counting function of MS Word for word processor files; scanning and OCR for manuscripts and non-editable files. Estimates are always based on the total number of characters, including spaces. This method is advantageous for customers, who pay only for the work that is actually done, and for translators, who can immediately size up the job.
If you have text in a Word file, you can read the character count yourself by going to the Review tab, clicking Word Count and reading the result opposite Characters (with spaces) (or in earlier versions, by clicking Word Count on the Instruments menu).
Characters with or without spaces in the original text?
“Why do you include the spaces in the total characters count? This way you obtain a higher amount than if only text characters are counted”. Our answer to this objection is that the final price depends on the coefficient applied to the unit of measure. Suppose you sell a product at a price per pound. If someone wants to buy by the kilo you will satisfy their request, but obviously the price for a kilo will be different from the price for a pound. In fact, it will be 2.2 times as much! The price of the product is the same in both cases.
The same logic applies to character counts with or without spaces. Excluding the spaces undoubtedly produces a lower number of characters, but this won’t reduce the time or the work it will take to do the job. Consequently, we cannot apply the same price as before to a different number of characters.
For the same reason, we do not adopt the system of counting words as is usually done in the United States.
The main disadvantage of this method is the variation in relation to each specific language, which makes it impossible to compare the cost of a text in different languages. German has long words, while in English and other languages the words are relatively short. A standard page of 1500 characters contains approx. 218 words in Italian, 212 in French, 250 in English and 190 in German. On a handwritten document, it is easy to count the words and that is why the method became so popular. But while human beings have no problems counting words, computers run into terrible obstacles. For example, MS Word considers a “word” more or less any sequence separated by spaces, line breaks, paragraph breaks or by certain types of punctuation. For example, the computer counts “legalisation/certification” as a single word while an intelligent being reads “legalisation” and “certification”, that is, two words.
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