What Counts as One Page in Translation Pricing?

One page means one page of the PDF you upload, holding up to 250 words. Each page is charged at the flat rate for your service level, which is $19.95 for Standard, $24.95 for Certified and $39.95 for Premium. A document that averages more than 250 words a page is charged by its words instead, so a single page carrying 600 words costs 2.4 pages. A two sided certificate uploaded as a two page PDF is two pages, even if it holds only 180 words in total. With both sides on one PDF page it is one page, and the free scanner in the Eagle Translate iPhone app puts them there for you.

The rule, defined

We count the pages in your PDF and the words on them, and charge for whichever is higher. In numbers, your page count times 250 is compared with your word count, and the larger of the two is the number of words you pay for, with a minimum of one page. The comparison covers the whole document, not each page on its own. Every 250 of those words costs one page at your service level.

Nothing is rounded up to a whole page. A one page PDF holding 300 words costs 1.2 pages, which is $29.94 at Certified, not the price of two pages.

The count is taken from the source document, the one you send us, and not from the finished translation. That matters because languages expand and contract. Text translated from English into Spanish typically grows by fifteen to twenty percent, and text moving the other way usually shrinks. If pricing followed the output, the same job would cost different amounts depending on the direction, and you could not be told the total before the work existed. Counting the source keeps the number fixed at the moment you upload.

Why pages, with words for dense pages

The page is the unit you can check yourself before you upload. A one page birth certificate costs the same whether it carries 90 words or 240, and a ten page decree of ordinary density costs ten pages.

Words only come in when a document is unusually dense. A birth certificate and an academic transcript can both be printed on one side of one sheet, and the transcript can hold five times the text. Charging a dense document by its words keeps the price in proportion to the work without raising the price of an ordinary page, and it still lets us show you the full total before you enter a card rather than sending an invoice afterwards.

Worked examples

These examples are priced exactly the way the order form prices a document.

| Document | PDF pages | Words | Charged as | Certified total | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Birth certificate, one side | 1 | 180 | 1 page | $24.95 | | Birth certificate, front and back | 2 | 180 | 2 pages | $49.90 | | Marriage certificate | 1 | 240 | 1 page | $24.95 | | Dense transcript page | 1 | 600 | 600 words, 2.4 pages | $59.88 | | Diploma plus transcript | 3 | 900 | 900 words, 3.6 pages | $89.82 | | Divorce decree | 10 | 2,100 | 10 pages | $249.50 | | Commercial contract | 20 | 6,000 | 6,000 words, 24 pages | $598.80 |

The same counts apply at every service level. The three page diploma and transcript carrying 900 words is $71.82 at Standard, $89.82 at Certified and $143.82 at Premium.

Documents with more than 250 words a page

They are charged by their words, not rounded up to whole pages. A one page PDF holding 260 words is $25.95 at Certified, about a dollar more than a one page certificate and not the $49.90 of two full pages.

The other half of the rule is that every page of your PDF counts as at least one page, however few words it holds. The page count, the word count and the total are all shown on screen before you pay, so neither half is a surprise on the receipt.

What gets translated

Everything on the original is translated, because everything that appears in the original has to appear in the translation for it to be complete.

• Names, dates, places and reference numbers
• Headings, table labels, column titles and footnotes
• Text inside stamps, seals and official markings
• Handwritten entries, signatures described in place, and marginal notes
• Registry numbers, form codes and printed boilerplate

A certified translation has to be a complete rendering of the source document, including the parts that look like furniture. An official reviewer comparing the translation against the original expects the seal text and the registry number to be there. Leaving them out to save a few words would make the document less useful, not cheaper.

Where the count comes from

It is measured from the PDF you upload. If you attach a photo instead, the order form turns it into a PDF in your browser first, and that PDF is what gets measured. Words are counted from the text inside the PDF, so a scan or a photo, which has no text to read, is priced by its pages alone. The page count, the word count and the price for each service level appear on the order form, and that total is what you pay by card.

If a scan is too faint for the text to be read with confidence, we come back to you before any work starts rather than guessing at what it says. The full sequence is described in what happens after you upload a document.

The per word equivalent, if you are comparing quotes

Divide each rate by 250 and you can line our pricing up against a provider who quotes per word. Standard is just under 8 cents a word. Certified is just under 10 cents. Premium, which is translated ahead of other orders and delivered in one to two business days, is about 16 cents. That per word rate is what a dense document costs. A page is never charged at less than the full page rate, so for a short certificate compare page prices instead.

When you compare, check whether the other quote includes certification, because a low per word rate with a certification fee bolted on at checkout is often the more expensive of the two. The services and pricing page shows what each of our levels includes, and there is a fuller breakdown in how much a certified translation costs.

The 50 page cap on one document

Each document you upload can be up to 50 PDF pages, however many words they hold. At the Certified rate a 50 page document costs at least $1,247.50, and more if it averages more than 250 words a page. Almost every personal filing, and most business documents, sit well inside it.

If your document is longer, contact us and we will quote and schedule the work with you. The rate is the same for every pair on the languages page, so a long document does not become more expensive because of the direction it is going. Chinese documents are the one exception to counting words. They are priced by page alone, because Chinese text has no spaces to count words by.

Upload your PDF at start an order to see your exact page count and price. Nothing is charged until you have seen both.