How we price bilingual delivery

English and Spanish are a scope line, not a mood. Bilingual delivery gets mispriced in two directions: teams that treat translation as a finishing nicety (and then discover that every page, email, form, meta tag and legal notice exists twice), and teams that sprinkle a "language premium" onto the invoice with nothing behind it. Here is how we build the number, so you can pressure-test anyone's quote with the same questions.

What "bilingual" includes — the real inventory

For Qvicom, a bilingual public site means parity, not decoration:

• Pages, not paragraphs: every public page exists in both languages, with matching structure — same sections, same forms, same calls to action. The Spanish version is written, not shrunk.
• The invisible layer: titles, descriptions, hreflang/canonical tags, Open Graph text, form validation messages, transactional emails and system notifications — the places where "we translated the site" quietly fails.
• Voice QA: a human pass over both languages against a shared glossary (what we call the same thing in each market), including units, dates, currency formats and names.
• Ongoing parity: new pages and features ship in both languages or they don't ship — parity is a maintenance cost, and a good quote says so.

Each of those lines has hours behind it. A quote that lists "bilingual (EN/ES)" with one number and no inventory is hiding the inventory; ask for it.

Markets: why USD and COP are different quotes

We quote U.S. work in USD and Colombian work in COP — not as a preference but because the two markets carry different cost realities, different competitive price bands and different payment rails. The currency on your quote matches the market you are selling into, which keeps comparisons honest on both sides of the aisle. What we never do is swap currencies mid-project to chase an exchange rate; the quote's currency is the invoice's currency.

Three questions that keep any bilingual number honest

1. "Walk me through the parity inventory for my pages." You want to hear pages, meta, forms, emails and QA — not "our translator handles it".
2. "Is the Spanish written or machine-translated, and who reviews it?" Machine output without a human pass is a brand risk with a deadline; the answer should name the pass, not the tool.
3. "What happens when we add a page in month three?" A good answer prices it inside the revision or change-order mechanics; a bad answer says "we'll see" — and that is where the surprise invoice is born.

The short version

Treat bilingualism the way you treat responsiveness: a scoped, testable requirement with a line in the quote. If the line isn't there, the cost is either under-counted (you'll meet it later, larger) or padded (you're paying for a ghost). Either way, ask for the inventory — the inventory is the price.