Translation company website design that publishes the rate card and shows its arithmetic

Every other design in this catalogue that ships software ships something to reserve — a diary, a table, a room, a place in a class. This one has nothing to reserve — and that turns out to be the commoner shape of business: a counter where the first question is always “what will this cost”, the honest answer is “it depends on four things”, and the current answer is a telephone call. The software here is a quote estimator. It asks at most eight questions, and which eight depends on the first answer, because somebody booking an interpreter should never be asked how many pages their document is. What comes back is a priced written scope with every line of the arithmetic on it — the page rate, the certificate, the handling, the speed, the total and the working days.

What makes an estimator worth anything is that it agrees with the published price list, and this one is built so that it cannot do otherwise. The rate card is a real page: three page rates by language group with the reason each group costs what it does printed beside the figure, six professional disciplines priced by the word across the same three groups, a minimum charge, the fees for the three acts that are not translation, rush multipliers, and interpreting by the hour. Every figure quoted anywhere on the site comes out of one file, which the page build, the browser and the test all load. A price cannot be changed in one place and not another.

The PHP that answers the form is the only second implementation of the arithmetic, because a browser cannot run PHP and a form post cannot run JavaScript. That duplication is policed rather than trusted: 115 worked cases go through both engines on every build and any disagreement fails it — not “the totals match” but every line item, in order, so a build where the server quietly loses a handling fee and still reaches the same sum does not pass. A gate then posts a real job to the real endpoint on the live site and asserts that the browser, the server and the no-JavaScript fallback all price it identically.

Around the estimator sits the reason a translation office is worth ninety-one pages. Twenty-four languages with a page each and sixteen document types with a page each, and every one of them carries the thing that makes it worth reading rather than a name and a price: two Spanish surnames against Portugal’s reversed order, a Hungarian family name written first, Polish and Czech endings that change with the gender of the person, a passport that says MUELLER where the birth record says Müller. A divorce decree that is not a divorce until a separate stamp on a separate page nobody photographs. A decimal comma read as a thousands separator, which is a factor of a thousand.