CATEGORY / Translation services

A practical guide to what on-site interpretation costs, when it's worth paying more for over a remote option, and how booking actually works.

CATEGORY / Translation services

Over the years we've gotten requests to translate the same document for different customers. Legal documents, mostly. Both parties to the same dispute, each sending us the same contract. This has probably happened to every language service provider at some point.

CATEGORY / Translation services

A death certificate is one page. What depends on it rarely is. An estate can't be settled, a life insurance claim can't be paid, and a probate case can't move forward until the document is not only translated, but translated in a way the receiving institution will actually accept.

CATEGORY / Translation services

I read a piece on X this week arguing there are only four ways to make money. Labor: you trade time for money. Capital: your money earns while you sleep. Arbitrage: you spot something priced wrong and close the gap. Insurance: you get paid to absorb risk other people can't sleep with. Everything else is a story on top.

CATEGORY / Translation services

I wrote recently that DTP, desktop publishing, is becoming a bottleneck in translation work. Not always, but often enough to notice. I used decks and packaging as my example: the kind of client-facing document where layout is the first thing anyone sees, and where AI handles the resize reasonably well but not well enough for anything that goes out the door.

CATEGORY / Translation services

We pulled a year of orders and split them two ways: our biggest repeat clients, the law firms and agencies placing ten or more orders a year, against everyone smaller than that.

CATEGORY / Translation services

A few weeks ago I wrote about the decision behind Tomedes' AI translation pricing: a flat $0.01 per word, no human proofreading in the default workflow, launched deliberately without knowing what buyers would actually do with it. I said we were watching the engagement data with genuine curiosity, and that the data would shape real decisions rather than our assumptions shaping it for us.

CATEGORY / Translation services

A client asks for a translation. The brief is straightforward: take this marketing copy, this app interface, this website, and render it in another language. The project ships on schedule. Then, weeks later, a request comes in for a quality review — because something about the finished product does not feel quite right to the local market it was meant to reach. This pattern shows up often enough in Tomedes' own project data that it is no longer a one-off surprise. This piece uses that data to explain what localization actually requires, why so much of it gets requested as plain translation, and what a properly scoped brief should include before a project starts — not after it ships.

CATEGORY / Translation services

French translation varieties differ by region. A practical guide to what changes between Standard, Canadian, and African French, and why it matters.

CATEGORY / Translation services

Most translation companies are adding AI options without saying clearly what buyers are getting. This post is about the reasoning behind Tomedes' decision to name the tracks explicitly, set a flat AI translation rate, and launch without assumptions built in — including the parts that aren't finished yet.