Technical Translation Time PT to ES

Portuguese to Spanish Technical Translation Time

Working from Portuguese into Spanish, a professional technical translator turns out around 400–500 words/day. The basic estimate is days = (pages × words_per_page) / daily_throughput. Portuguese and Spanish are sister Romance languages and share roughly 89% lexical similarity, but that closeness doesn't get you off the hook: technical projects still mean terminology research, glossary upkeep, processing through a CAT tool like Trados, memoQ or Wordfast, and at least one full revision pass before anything goes out.

What slows you down most is the false friend (falsos amigos). In Spanish, exquisito means delicious or refined, never rare; embarazada means pregnant, not embarrassed; oficina is an office, not a workshop. Regional variants matter just as much. LATAM Spanish for Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Colombia parts ways with Castilian Spanish on terminology, register, even verb conjugation (vos vs tú).

Applications

Use it to budget Brazilian manuals, contracts and product documentation headed for Mercosur markets, e-commerce launches across Hispanic LATAM, pharmaceutical dossiers for ANMAT (Argentina) and ISP (Chile), or work aligning ABNT standards with IRAM. For this pair, SINTRA reference rates land around R$ 0.40–0.80 per source word.

FAQ

Can I translate PT→ES faster than other pairs? Usually yes. Throughput tends to run 30–50% above PT→EN thanks to the structural similarity, though the technical revision still takes the same amount of time.

Should I localize to a specific country? With technical and legal documents, name the target country every time. Neutral LATAM Spanish is fine for marketing, but it won't cut it for regulated content.

Does CAT tool memory cut costs? It does. Repetitions and high fuzzy matches usually get billed at 25–50% of the full word rate.