Hindi is where the biggest thing I have done sits: a full school curriculum, grades one through six, across mathematics, science, history, geography, language, writing and reading. Five million words in the Urdu pass and the rest in Hindi, held to one terminology so that a child meets the same word for fraction in year two and in year five. That is not a translation job. It is a terminology job with translation attached.
The failure mode is register, not accuracy
The most common problem in commercial Hindi is not mistranslation. It is Hindi that is technically correct and nobody speaks. Spoken Hindi carries a large amount of English: people say mobile, ticket, report, account. A translator reaching for the Sanskritised equivalent produces copy that reads as a government circular, which is fine for a government circular and fatal for a product.
The judgement is knowing which register the document is for. A consent form and an app onboarding screen and a textbook for eight year olds want three different Hindis, and the same translator has to be able to write all three. That is what thirty-six years buys you, and it is not something a rate card can express.
Devanagari breaks interfaces
Hindi set in Devanagari runs roughly 15 to 20 percent longer than the English it came from, and conjunct characters stack vertically, so a line box sized for Latin clips the top of them. A string that fit the button in English will not fit the button in Hindi.
For localization work I translate against the constraint rather than translating and then discovering it: if a label has to fit, it has to fit, and the shorter phrasing is chosen at translation time rather than patched afterwards by somebody who does not read the script.
Video, speech and the voice of a machine
Educational and conference video into Hindi is a long running strand of the work, including talks and course material. I translate the transcript. I do not time or engineer subtitles, and I would rather say so than take the purchase order and subcontract the part I do not do.
Speech data is the other half of it: material for systems learning to hear and speak Hindi, which needs a translator who will write how people actually talk rather than how they write.
Clinical and regulated Hindi
Informed consent, patient information and questionnaires, translated forward and then back into English by the same hand so a sponsor can see what the patient will actually read. Where the full instrument workflow is needed, the chain runs to eight steps with clinician review and cognitive debriefing: how that works. Two of the four published samples are into Hindi.
What it costs. From $0.14 a source word for medical and legal work, from $0.12 for everything else, with a $50 minimum on anything up to 500 words. Certified documents are quoted on sight of a scan. The full rate sheet and the Trados match grid are public, because a rate you have to ask for is a rate that moves depending on who is asking.