Standard line

While in the UK, the US and other countries, translation services are charged on the basis of a rate per word or a rate per page, it is established practice in Germany and elsewhere to determine the fee of translators on the basis of a price per line.

With the former typewriters and their standard fonts such as Courier, a full line would always have more or less the same number of characters. The modern word processors, however, permit the use of very small fonts and proportional fonts (such as Arial or Times New Roman). So with these fonts, there will be many more characters in one line. And if you are paid by the line, it can make a huge difference if the line has 50 or 80 characters. For that reason, the text is recalculated into standard lines (in our case with 50 characters).