Express charges – what am I actually paying for?
We all have to work under time pressure sometimes. You know how it is – yesterday was too late, stress is reaching critical levels and the costs of failing to meet a deadline can reach exorbitant figures.
That’s when you need express service… which comes with express charges. Even in cases when your text is not particularly long. So why are you paying more? Let’s discuss express charges in more detail.
Many clients mistakenly believe that express charges are applied to texts that are either too long or too difficult. But that would be very far from the truth. As you know, we do not ask for any extra charges for required expertise for translations delivered in standard deadlines, so the extra charge has nothing to do with that.
In terms of length, the usual working tempo is 10 standard pages per business day, which means that translation jobs exceeding 30 standard pages which you need faster than in the standard period are considered express translations. The express charge gives your text priority and ensures that our project managers will move it to the top of their queue. That’s why the extra charge is also applied to shorter texts.
If you need a translation within two or three business days (and our regular clients know that we often manage to miraculously deliver a translation on the same day), what we have to do after your confirmation is stop doing everything else and work almost exclusively on your urgent request, because there is usually no time to waste. This requires the latest translation technologies which of course also are not free.
We must often quickly assemble an entire team of translators and figure out the best way to tackle the job, because translating long texts in extreme deadlines is beyond the capabilities of any single translator. Our job is then to coordinate the team, create and monitor a terminology glossary and quickly facilitate any communication with the customer and between our individual translators.
Sometimes our clients need their translations so urgently that it becomes an enormous challenge to deliver everything within the set deadline at a quality that would meet our standards. On the other hand, this is one of the factors that make our job so interesting and varied, so even though express translations naturally come with a certain amount of unavoidable stress, we’re looking forward to the next challenges that you’ll set for us.
