Budgeting

Once considered an additional expense of doing business, translation is now a driver of growth and revenue when done right.

Most of the available TMSs are cloud-based subscription systems. They are never free for corporate use so you need to pay for them based on the number of (concurrent) users or data usage, required features, monthly or annually. It can be difficult to compare pricing plans of different providers, but, ultimately, it is the annual cost that should be budgeted.

It is a must to draft a business plan showing the return on investment (ROI) to be presented to your management. It should contain all costs to be incurred on a TMS and the translation volume currently processed by your organization. You should also indicate that a TMS automates a lot of tasks, so fewer manual steps = lower translation costs.

You can check the official XTM pricing, but it is also a good practice of TMS providers to offer discounts to regular customers or for bigger purchase volume.

Usually, each TMS offer has different plans with available features for various target groups (e.g. small translation teams, bigger LSPs, enterprises). If you decide to buy XTM Cloud, you pay for the number of concurrent users. Their plan for enterprises includes license bands, which are based on the rate, multiplied by the number of users.

For example, for 10 concurrent users you can spend approx. € 6,000 per year plus € 3,000 if you need special connectors (e.g. for InDesign files and MT engine).

You need to balance this investment with savings that you have on your translation projects (due to the reuse of previous content from translation memories and discounts offered by vendors), which can be as high as 60%. Add to that a possibility of using secure machine translation engine (and more savings!), improved quality and faster time to market for your products.