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My pricing strategy in translation
I adopted the same strategy Japanese car manufacturers used to defeat their American rivals: I offer a high quality service for average market prices.
For those seeking cheap translations, I have no shame from recommending the use of free automatic translation available on the Internet. The flaws will be different from those found in translation done by amateurs, but the overall quality level will be pretty much the same. The brighter side is that if the translation has to be redone with good quality later, there will be more money left in the budget to afford it.
I haven't yet mastered the technique to lower quality and therefore cost. As a matter of fact, I haven't even tried. I prefer to keep up my standards.
Some insights on prices in the translation market
First, let's leave aside the Brazilian market for sworn/certified translations, as statutory rates are set by each Brazilian state. The law says that those rates must be practiced. On the other hand, there is always someone willing to break the law; otherwise the law would be unnecessary. If a sworn Brazilian translator offers illegal discounts, it is safe to assume that they won't abide by the law in other things as well. It's like knowingly buying a fake product. If any problem ever arises, the buyer will have received in cash (the discount) their compensation for solving it on their own.
Apart from that, the translation market is completely deregulated: each translator may charge whatever they think they are worth. Yet there is another peculiarity... thanks to the Internet, the translation market is fully globalized. The original to be translated may be e-mailed anywhere in the world, and the translation may be shipped back via the same route. There are no boundaries.
The only problem resides in finding qualified translators outside the countries where the target language is spoken, as there will be very few of them, if any. Furthermore, that translator may be out of date regarding the language currently spoken in their homeland.
To illustrate, there are countries in the Far East where the cost of living is comparatively very low, so where translation services may cost very cheap. However what would be the odds of finding a good English to Portuguese translator in India or China?
Nevertheless, the supply-and-demand law prevails. This ubiquity the Internet grants translators also provides them with a benchmark on worldwide translation rates, in order to adapt to this globalized market. Assuming that nobody wants to sell their work for less than it's worth, and that whoever practices overly high prices will be in low demand, translation market rates are gradually settling worldwide.
There are several factors at play, such as the supply/demand ratio for each of the various language pairs, that prevent rates from being more uniform. Each language pair, and each direction within the same pair (i.e from A into B vs. from B into A) have their unique distribution.
However translation services exist in countless levels of complexity and quality. A competent translator who charges too little will be overwhelmed with work, and won't be able to earn a living. An incompetent translator who overcharges their low quality work will soon run out of clients. Hence there is a natural settling of prices, though it is not sufficiently reliable for anyone to believe that translation quality will be proportional to its cost; nevertheless, it is some reference.
The settling down of translation prices
By this time (I am referring to 2009), I have noticed an interesting phenomenon taking place in translation prices. Let's assume that the average market price for a certain good quality translation job done by a competent professional were 100. Job size and currency are irrelevant here. This is just a yardstick. Depending on each translator's marketing aggressiveness, we could spread this to a range spanning from 90 to 110.
Above this range we'd find highly specialized translators in specific areas of human knowledge, for jobs requiring a deep understanding of the subject at hand.
Immediately below we'd have a price range from 70 to 80, featuring barely "passable" translations. A spellchecker won't find errors in them, but the text evokes a sensation of "translated" in green neon letters flashing all the time. Polyglot readers tend to involuntarily back-translate everything while trying to understand. Monoglots often wade in their perplexity. Many web sites have been translated like this. When text has been translated from Portuguese, unusual expressions abound, false cognates included, such as "actually" wrongly placed to mean "presently" or "nowadays". Latin-based words and expressions prevail heavily over everyday English expressions, such as "frequently" instead of "often", or "in any other manner" instead of "otherwise".
On the bottom end of the scale we'd have translations done for 50 or less, i.e. half of the price of a quality translation. Personally, I think that outsourcing a translation at this level is a waste of money. Free automatic translation available on the web produces different flaws, however the overall quality level is pretty much the same. When I receive queries about translations in this price range, I usually suggest they use free automatic translation. If it's being done just for the record, to comply with some requirement and then be filed forever, no money will be wasted. However if this translation is in fact necessary, free automatic translation will leave more money in the budget to hire a qualified professional.
The watchful reader will have noticed that I said nothing about a price of 60 on this scale. This is a spot where a chasm is developing. No translator sufficiently skilled to charge more will take a job at this price. Likewise, translation clients are learning that the quality that they will get at this level may be found cheaper. This range is turning into a desert of translators and clients alike, drawing the line between unacceptable and barely passable work.