Free tool
Translation quote calculator with fuzzy bands and a minimum fee
Enter the analysis figures from your CAT tool, your per word rate and your minimum fee, and see both the quote total and the real rate per source word it works out to.
Free tool, no sign up
Translation deadline and capacity planner
Before you accept a delivery date, check the word count against your genuine throughput, your review time and the hours you can actually protect in a day.
Translators overcommit for a predictable reason: the daily output figure people quote is a peak figure, measured on a good file with no meetings, no other client, and no self review at the end. Real capacity is lower, and the gap is where weekend work comes from. This planner uses your sustained hourly throughput for the subject matter in front of you, adds review time as a percentage, adds the fixed handling every job carries, and tells you how many working days the job needs.
The final output is the number to look at. Slack in days is what is left between what the job needs and what the deadline allows. A small positive figure means you can take the job but should not take another one this week. A negative figure means the answer is either a later deadline, a rush surcharge that pays for the evening work, or a polite no.
Your result
Translation hours
21.8
Drafting time at your sustained pace, before review.
Total hours needed
28.0
Drafting plus review plus the fixed handling this job carries.
Working days needed
5.1
Total hours spread across the focused hours you actually get.
Slack before the deadline
0.9
A negative figure means the deadline needs evening or weekend work.
If slack is under half a day, treat the job as a rush and price the surcharge from your rate card rather than absorbing it.
Measuring your real throughput
Take three recent jobs in the same subject area, note the source word count and the honest hours from opening the file to delivering it, and divide. Most working translators land somewhere between four hundred and eight hundred words an hour on familiar material, and considerably lower on dense technical, legal or medical text where terminology research interrupts the flow.
Do the exercise per specialty rather than once overall. Your pace on a patent abstract and your pace on tourism copy are not the same number, and quoting both from one average guarantees you overcommit on the hard one and underquote the easy one. Update the figure once a year, since throughput on a familiar client usually improves as the glossary fills out.
What the slack figure is really telling you
Slack is not spare time, it is protection. Files arrive corrupted, clients send a revised source halfway through, an urgent certificate lands from a regular account you will not turn away, and occasionally you get sick. A job planned with zero slack fails on the first of those.
Use the figure as a decision rule rather than a report. Comfortably positive slack means yes at normal rates. Slack near zero means yes with a rush tier applied, since the client is buying your evening. Negative slack means propose a later date or a partial delivery. Sending that message before you accept costs one email, while sending it two days before the deadline costs the account.
Questions about this calculator
Should I include review time if a separate reviewer handles it?
Include your own checking pass regardless, because delivering unchecked work to a reviewer damages your standing with an agency quickly. If a second linguist reviews after you, plan their hours separately and make sure the delivery date leaves room for them. A deadline that only fits the translation is not a deadline that fits the job.
How should I plan a subtitle or transcreation job with this?
Convert the work into an equivalent word figure first, or plan those jobs in hours directly, since neither behaves predictably per word. Subtitle work is normally measured per runtime minute and includes spotting and reading speed checks. Transcreation can take an hour for a single headline, which no per word planner will ever predict.
What if the client will not move the deadline?
Then you have three honest options: quote a rush surcharge that pays for the evening and weekend hours, propose delivery in staged batches so they get the urgent sections first, or decline. Accepting a date the arithmetic does not support is the fourth option and it is the one that costs you the client anyway.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The quote-ready file checklist
Twenty checks that stand between an incoming file and a price you will not regret, grouped in the order you actually do them.
That figure, against the client record
You just priced or planned one file with numbers you typed in by hand. The version worth having pulls the fuzzy grid you agreed with that account, applies the minimum fee automatically and opens the client glossary beside the quote. Twenty minutes on a demo, using your own language pairs and your own figures rather than our examples.