Project estimation is a feature only available to a specific number of accounts. If you're not seeing the estimation step during the project creation flow, it may not be a bug, but rather a feature not enabled for your Portal. Talk to your Account Manager for more information.

Estimation

As the last step before submitting a project, we will run an estimation that will predict both its cost and its expected delivery time. This allows you to have a general idea of the price for your whole project and how it fares agains your remaining usage allowance or simply how much may it charge you once completed.

Estimation begins after you move a project past its review step by clicking Next. This will "lock" the project and trigger the calculation based on the Project setting defined in the previous steps.

Once you confirm you want to lock the project and request the estimate, a new screen will appear. Estimation is not immediate. During its course, you may choose to submit the project anyway without an estimation, or save and quite the project so you can come back to it later. The bigger the project, either in translatable content size or number of files, the longer estimation will take. However, estimation usually doesn't take more than a few minutes.

A project undergoing estimation will reflect the Estimating status in the Portal, which gives way to Estimated once the process is complete. An email is additionally sent to the project requester to inform about the estimation being ready.

Accessing an estimated process will display the following information across several detail cards:

• Project Summary. Here you can find information on the previous settings and services selected for the project.
• Estimated balance left after project completion.
• Cost Estimate. The cost for the project can be broken down here.
• Delivery time estimate.

Delivery is calculated based on number of words translated per day, per project, from the average of Unbabel activity. Delivery may thus vary.

Each card will contain further information if expanded.

The Cost Estimate card in particular allows you to check how much usage the project can consume per each order and each language contained in it.

In order to send a project for translation, you are required to click the Submit project button.

Estimation in projects with services

For the time being, it's still not possible to provide an automatic estimation for a project where at least one order contains any type of service requested. If that is the case, you'll see the following screen instead:

Don't worry. You will still receive an estimation, but you should be on the lookout for an email from one of your POCs at Unbabel where it is provided.

Re-processing an estimation

If you need to make changes to an estimated project if for some reason you need to change its settings. To do this, click on the Previous button to return to the Review screen. 

From here, you can navigate the remaining steps of the project to introduce any changes. Once you are ready to estimate again, the new calculation will take into consideration any edits you performed.

You can only return to project edition once an estimation is complete, and never while it's ongoing.

An estimation constitutes the maximum price you will pay for the project. Your final cost may be lower but never higher than the estimate.

TM discounts and breakdown

If you are using variable pricing for your project, you can benefit from translation memory (TM) and quality estimation (QE) savings. These are calculated when the project is estimating.

In the Estimates screen, you’ll find an overview that highlights the number of TM matches, their blocking behaviour, and the associated savings.

• 100% Matches occur when the main segment of the TM entry exactly matches the text being translated.
• In-Context Exact (ICE) Matches occur when the main segment and the surrounding context (previous and next segments) align perfectly with the TM entry.
• Blocked: Translators can view the segment but cannot make changes.
• Unblocked: Translators can modify the segment if necessary.

You can expand each file and language to check your savings with more granularity. The savings are applied to both the machine translation modules and each human module in the pipeline selected for translation. If you wish to dive deeper into the details, you can explore each file, language pair, and module individually to see the exact savings applied.

You can revisit your estimated discounts once the project is complete by visiting the project details and looking for the estimated cost.

If you notice discrepancies or need more information about your specific configuration, please reach out to your Unbabel account manager.

Final cost

Once your project is completed, you can view the final cost directly in the Projects app, reflecting the same information found in the Reports app. By opening a completed project, you'll have access to the Final Cost and a detailed breakdown of the associated values.

Additionally, you can compare the final cost with the initial cost estimate in this view. For clients on variable pricing plans, detailed breakdowns of translation memory savings are available in the cost estimates but not available in the final cost breakdown.

Differences between the final cost and the estimate may occur due to the following reasons:

• Quality Estimation (QE) Savings – These are only applied to the final cost, not the initial estimate.
• Changes to Translation Memory Entries – Although less regular, translation memory entries created between the time the project was estimated and when it was submitted and translated can lead to discrepancies.

If your project is completed, the cost shown in the project card in your list of projects is the final cost.