Some fellow translators are charging their translation fees based on the length of the target text. I do not consider that sufficiently transparent to you as a client. Because you will not know how much the translation will cost you when you are placing your order.

These fellow translators are working with so-called expansion factors. These are statistical values based on experience to determine how much longer or shorter the target text will be compared to the source text. In my point of view, these expansion factors are an unsuitable means because they may be correct or not depending on the source text.

In particular translating from Chinese allows only for sketchy estimations how long the target text will really be because some characters translate to words of two characters and others to longer words or even the same character must be translated differently with different length of text depending on context. Therefore I always base my fees on the amount for source text.

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