Technical Translation Review Time

Technical Translation Revision Time

Revising a technical translation happens at two speeds. Light revision is a monolingual pass over the target text, checking fluency, consistent terminology and surface errors, and it runs at 1,500–2,500 words/hour. Deep revision means reading the target against the source to catch accuracy problems, missing chunks, omissions, mistranslations and wrong register, which pulls the pace down to 800–1,200 words/hour.

Formula: hours = (pages × words_per_page) / hourly_throughput. In practice, modern workflows hand the mechanical checks to CAT tool QA modules such as Xbench, Verifika or the QA built into SDL Trados and memoQ. That frees the reviewer to spend their time on the harder stuff: whether the meaning holds, whether the terminology stays faithful, and whether the text reads coherently end to end.

Applications

This step is required in any workflow certified under ABNT NBR ISO 17100:2015 (Translation services — Requirements for translation services). The standard spells out the TEP cycle (Translation + Editing + Proofreading) and insists on a second qualified linguist doing the review. For the Brazilian market, ABRATES (Associação Brasileira de Tradutores e Intérpretes) puts out professional guidelines that track ISO 17100. You'll see it come up with pharmaceutical IFUs and SmPCs, EU regulatory submissions, legal contracts under NDA, and post-edited machine translation (MTPE).

FAQ

What is the difference between revision and proofreading? Under ISO 17100, revision is bilingual, lining up target against source. Proofreading is a final monolingual look at the target on its own. You charge for both: revision usually lands at 30–50% of translation rates and proofreading at 10–20%.

Can AI replace the reviewer? Not really. LLM-based QA is fine for typos and terminology drift, but it slips past cultural register, legal nuance and the omissions that leave no trace. ISO certification still calls for human revision.

How are revision rates billed? Per source word is the usual choice. Hourly billing fits messy source files or heavy MTPE, and per-page billing hangs around in older print workflows. Whichever it is, pin down the metric in writing before the job kicks off.