For decades, translation has largely been priced around one simple unit: the word.
That made sense when the amount of content a translator could produce in a day placed a natural limit on capacity.
AI is changing that equation.
In a recent episode of Firing On All Syllables, Renato Beninatto, Chairman and Co-Founder of Nimdzi Insights, put the disruption plainly: the translation industry’s pricing model is based on a unit that has “become irrelevant.”
The word.
Word count remains useful for scoping and pricing. But when AI can process enormous volumes in a fraction of the time, volume alone tells us less about the value of the work.
When the Unit Changes, the Economics Change
The traditional translation model was built around a basic constraint: how much a professional translator could produce.
