Case Study: How Certling Helped Reduce Translation Costs for a UK Visa Application

Background

Alexandra needed certified translations of several documents for her UK Home Office visa application. As part of her submission to UKVI, she had to provide a tenancy agreement, bank statements, and payslips—a total of 17 pages of documents.

The Challenge

Translation costs can quickly add up, especially with per-page pricing models used by many providers. Government guidelines for certified translation do not stipulate that documents must be complete translations. In this regard, it is possible to safely remove unnecessary content—such as marketing spill and irrelevant details—and focus only on the key information required for visa approval.

However, most translation providers charge for every page, even when large portions of the text are not needed. Additionally, many of these providers impose a 250-word limit per page, meaning that if a page exceeds this threshold, it is counted as two pages or more, drastically increasing costs.

Alexandra faced a high quote because of:

  • ✔ Unnecessary content on her payslips and bank statements
  • ✔ Repeated information across multiple pages
  • ✔ A lengthy tenancy agreement with legal clauses that were not required by UKVI
  • ✔ Per-page pricing that penalised longer pages, making some pages cost twice the standard rate

How Certling’s Pricing Works

Unlike traditional translation providers that charge per page, Certling uses advanced machine vision technology to enable precise per-word pricing, even for scanned or handwritten documents.

  1. Document Analysis: Certling automatically scans uploaded documents—including PDFs, scans, and even handwritten content—identifying and extracting the text within them.
  2. Text Framing & Selection: The client is presented with an interactive preview of their document where each section of text is framed and numbered.
  3. Remove Unnecessary Content: The client can easily deselect text boxes containing information that is not required for translation.
  4. Instant Quote Calculation: Once the selection is finalised, Certling recalculates the word count and instantly provides a fair, transparent price, ensuring that clients only pay for what they need translated.

Certling’s Solution for Alexandra

With Certling’s “Remove Content” feature, Alexandra was able to exclude non-essential details and only pay for what she actually needed translated.

  • Payslips: Reduced from 160 words to 50 words per document
  • Bank Statements: Unnecessary footers were removed from each page
  • Tenancy Agreement: Instead of translating the entire document, Alexandra was able to remove multiple pages and focus only on the two pages that contained the necessary information—such as the agreement between parties and the property address.

This cut the total word count from 4,590 words to 2,482 words, a reduction of 2,108 words, resulting in significant savings.

The Results

  • 💰 Saved £210 on translation costs
  • 📉 Final quote with Certling: £198.27
  • ⚖️ **Compared to competitors charging per page (£340–£510), Certling was up to 61% cheaper

Importantly, these savings do not take into account that most competitors would have translated the entire tenancy agreement, not just the two pages we advised Alexandra to focus on. Had she gone with a per-page provider, the cost would have been significantly higher.

Additionally, thanks to Certling’s per-word pricing, pages with naturally low word counts, such as the payslips, were already cheaper than the per-page pricing model—even before removing unnecessary content.

Alexandra not only reduced her costs but also received her certified translations faster, as our streamlined system required fewer words to be translated.

Client Testimonial

"We used Certling to translate our documents from German to English for a UK visa application and had an excellent experience. Their platform allows you to upload documents, select only the necessary sections for translation, and receive an instant quote based on word count. The customer support team is always available via chat, providing quick, helpful, and efficient assistance. The service was fast, reliable, and highly responsive. I would highly recommend Certling for a seamless and efficient translation process."

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