A guy who works for a book publisher once told me that they pay about 8 euro’s per 1000 words to a good translator for books they translate from foreign languages. So by this calculation you can have a 100.000 words text translated in Romanian for 800 euros.
Facing the Singularity is approximately 14000 words. The hypothetical 10-page primers would probably be even shorter, maybe 3000 words, although hoping to get them down to 10 pages might be optimistic. So if translations to other languages are similarly priced, you’re looking at around $600 for all four translations of Facing the Singularity, or around $100 for the shorter primers.
This doesn’t include “checks and improvements by multiple translators”, but I imagine those can probably obtained more cheaply than an actual translation, and it seems like $2000 is far too high an estimate for the cost.
A guy who works for a book publisher once told me that they pay about 8 euro’s per 1000 words to a good translator for books they translate from foreign languages. So by this calculation you can have a 100.000 words text translated in Romanian for 800 euros.
Facing the Singularity is approximately 14000 words. The hypothetical 10-page primers would probably be even shorter, maybe 3000 words, although hoping to get them down to 10 pages might be optimistic. So if translations to other languages are similarly priced, you’re looking at around $600 for all four translations of Facing the Singularity, or around $100 for the shorter primers.
This doesn’t include “checks and improvements by multiple translators”, but I imagine those can probably obtained more cheaply than an actual translation, and it seems like $2000 is far too high an estimate for the cost.
There are always unanticipated costs. I find that I generally need 1.5-2 times the amount of money that I know the use for beforehand .