Pricing
Translation & Localisation Data: cost and pricing in India
Indicative rate bands for translation & localisation data, the five specification decisions that move the number most, and how a fixed quote is put together from a written spec.
- Pricing model
- Per delivered unit, fixed against spec
- Minimum
- ~50 hours or equivalent per language
- Turnaround
- 2-4 weeks for typical corpus volumes per language pair.
- Quote time
- One working day
What drives the price of translation
Human translation and parallel-corpus creation across Indian languages, built for machine-translation training and multilingual LLM evaluation rather than for publication.
- Language tier: widely spoken languages have deeper recruitment pools and cost less per unit than low-resource ones
- Demographic narrowness: a 50/50 gender split across three age bands is routine; a narrow cohort multiplies recruitment effort
- Direction — English to Indian languages and between Indian languages. Moving this off the standard changes the unit cost directly.
- Output — Sentence-aligned parallel corpora. Moving this off the standard changes the unit cost directly.
- Register — Formal, colloquial, or matched to your product tone. Moving this off the standard changes the unit cost directly.
- Review — Independent bilingual review pass. Moving this off the standard changes the unit cost directly.
- QA threshold and rework policy: a higher accept bar means more re-collection, which is priced in rather than absorbed later
Where the cost sits in translation
Translators are native in the target language and screened on domain samples.
Turnaround: 2-4 weeks for typical corpus volumes per language pair.
Indicative rate bands
| Scope | Unit | Indicative band |
|---|---|---|
| Widely spoken language, standard spec | per delivered hour | ₹3,200 – ₹6,500 |
| Regional language, standard spec | per delivered hour | ₹4,200 – ₹8,200 |
| Low-resource language or narrow cohort | per delivered hour | ₹5,500 – ₹11,000 |
| Verbatim transcription add-on | per audio hour | ₹900 – ₹2,400 |
| Pilot batch (10-20 hours) | fixed | Quoted separately, credited against the full run |
These are bands, not a price list. Two projects with the same hour count can differ by 3x on cohort design alone, which is why every number here is replaced by a fixed figure once we see your specification.
What the price includes
- Sentence-aligned parallel data
- Updated glossary
- Reviewer notes on ambiguous source
How the quote is built
- Glossary and register agreement
- Translation by native speakers of the target language
- Independent bilingual review
- Alignment verification
- Delivery with terminology report
Where budgets get wasted
The most expensive mistake in a data purchase is buying volume before the specification is settled. Re-collecting 200 hours because the noise profile did not match deployment costs more than the entire QA layer would have.
Back-translation checks are run on a sample so you can see where source ambiguity, not translator error, causes divergence.
Best suited for
- MT training
- Multilingual LLM eval
- Product localisation data
Frequently asked
How much does translation cost per hour in India?
Most programmes land between ₹3,200 and ₹11,000 per delivered unit depending on language tier, cohort narrowness, recording condition and annotation depth. A written specification converts that band into a single fixed number.
Is there a minimum order?
Around 50 hours or equivalent per language for a production run. Pilots of 10-20 hours are accepted when they lead into a larger build, since most setup cost sits in specification and recruitment.
Do you charge for rejected audio?
No. You pay for delivered units that pass the agreed QA threshold. Rejected material is re-collected at our cost.
Can the price be fixed rather than estimated?
Yes. Once the specification is signed the price is fixed against it. Changes to quotas, conditions or annotation depth are re-quoted before work continues.
Related pages
Get a fixed price for translation
Send the volume, languages and quality bar you have in mind and you get a scoped price within a working day.