Fair-Priced Quality Services

Our translation and proofreading services cover a variety of areas ranging from B2B (business) to B2C (personal) relations. A proofreading service can be used in combination with a translation service. When used in combination with a translation service, it functions as an extra service option to accompany that translation service.

Thus, a customer can selectively request their desired service order option(s) for their affordable price and choose to minimize the number of our staff involved in the service order processing and thereby save service costs.

Note: Proofreading here means either a native check or a cross-check (where source and target texts are cross-checked to verify translation quality and conformity, and remove errors).

Thanks to recent advancements in machine learning and translation technologies, MTPE can now help us satisfy different customer and consumer needs. In our MTPE services, we seek to ensure the quality of a machine-generated translation through the so-called post-editing (PE) process whereby a human translator (called a post-editor) checks and, as necessary, amends the machine-generated translation for quality control purposes.

The following two types of MTPE services are available at the Office: Light and Full MTPE. For details, see the table below and read the description of each service shown underneath the table.

Service	Price	Level of understanding/accuracy	Throughput
Light	Lower	Lower	Higher
Full	Higher	Higher	Lower

Light MTPE: Basically designed not simply to correct non-negligible or major translation errors, but also to amend any translation that does not make any sense. Content-wise, when the post-editor considers a translation understandable or meaningful, they choose not to amend the translation (neither grammar nor style corrections to be made). Therefore, this is best suited, for example, to a (quick-delivery) project which carries a large volume of text that needs translating (high throughput) but does not particularly require a very accurate understanding of the text.

Full MTPE: In this service, with more stress on legibility than the former above, the post-editor reviews and edits a machine-generated translation so as to ensure that the translation is appropriate grammatically, structurally, and semantically. It is higher in quality than the other (still not comparable in quality to human translations though). This can deal with a larger translation volume than human translations but has lower throughput and higher service cost than the other. It is best suited, for example, to a project whose turnaround time and translation volume are too short and large, respectively, for human translators to cope with and also which requires the translation output to be grammatically, structurally, and semantically accurate to a sufficient degree.

Other services than the ones described above are also available at the Office. Correction or proofreading of customer translated text is a service designed to proofread a translation made by a customer. For instance, in the case of English (E) or Chinese (C) to Japanese (J) translation text, our staff compares the E or C source text and the J target text (namely, the translated version of the source text) and corrects the target text, as appropriate. Please note, however, that what we do here in this service is just to review or, as necessary, correct the translation or descriptive errors, if any, but not to check or examine the accuracy of the translated text itself.

Transcription service is designed to transcribe the spoken part of, let’s say, a Japanese speech into a Japanese text, as well as, upon request, to translate the Japanese text into English or Chinese. The service price for a transcription alone (or the combined service price for both a transcription plus an accompanying translation) can vary depending on the content or difficulty of the speech, and the condition of the recording on your medium such as a tape or disk. Please understand that if the recording on your medium is in poor condition, we may not be able to work on its transcription in the first place and so may have no choice but to decline your transcription order or request from you.

In addition, we are also ready to take on a time-based project whose price can just be set on a per-hour basis hourly paid job, although we basically calculate and set the price of a particular translation project on the basis of the number of source text characters or words to be translated for that project. We deal with such a time-based/-oriented project at a service price of 2600 JPY or more per hour, and the price for using this service for each time-based project could differ according to the content, nature and difficulty of the project, and the volume of data involved therein.