When I started out as a freelance translator, I had little idea about how to price my own work. My research eventually gave me an indication of how much some translators in some markets charged per word, but it still left me wondering how much I could quote myself, as a beginner with no clients, little knowledge of the market and no name in the industry. And yet ignorance is only valid as an excuse for a short time, and any freelancer who is serious about their career should do their homework and increase their rates to whatever their work is worth. I did that, or tried to.
I have learned a lot over the past two years, about rates and about a lot of other things. However, I have had a few interesting experiences on pricing in recent months that show the learning process is ongoing. Other people may perhaps benefit from those experiences too, so allow me to share them.
1 - I got an email from a potential client. The job seemed to be perfect for me, and the client appeared to agree: they found me, after all. It was a direct client, but they found me through ProZ.com, so I felt shy about quoting too high. They obviously knew about the bulk market and all that, and it was a nice project after all, so I quoted them my high agency rate rather than give them a direct-client quote. Their reply was plain embarrassing for me: they paid all their freelancers a figure that was about 40 per cent higher than my quote!!! They were nice enough to say it, and to pay me that higher rate too. However, it was not all good: I got to feel like a rookie. Still, I learned a valuable lesson about the value of my own work.
2 - I got an email from a potential client. It was a large corporate client, and someone at the company had referred them to me for my translation services. I knew I would need to do a good job, and I knew I would need to invest in proofreading. Beyond that, however, I realised that I was no longer just a freelance translator and was acting as a translation business instead. I quoted high, far above the rate I would quote any agency. However, that presented no problem: the client accepted my price, and I delivered work to compete with that of any translation agency. There was no reason to get paid less than them!
3 - I do some work for one of those translation marketplace websites. The website has a standard, cheap rate and an "expert" rate, and I like the fact that I can pick and choose jobs. Through them, I had a client I liked, with interesting texts paid at the "expert" rate, and they apparently liked me too: I was their designated translator for those jobs. Then, one day, a few months into this peculiar partnership, I started being offered those jobs at the standard rate. I must have taken one or two until I realised! However, when I realised, I wrote polite messages to both my anonymous client and the translation marketplace website: I did not feel comfortable suddenly doing the same work for almost half the money; I understood that the client would want to see if they could spend less, so I wished them good luck in the search; if they actually found that the end result for almost half the money was not up to standard, I would be more than happy to resume collaboration at the expert rate. Three weeks went by in which I continued to be offered the jobs, and refrained from taking them on. After three weeks, lo and behold, the client had cash to spare! Either that or they had realised that what they got for the standard rate was not actually up to standard at all. Their jobs were back at the "expert" rate, so they got back their expert, preferred translator - me.
I think these experiences show that rates are much less of a given than beginning translators usually realise. It is not true that no one out there is prepared to pay double-digit rates. It is also not true that clients do not notice the difference between poor work and reasonable work, and even between reasonable work and outstanding work. Finding the right clients and standing one's ground is important, but what is really crucial is to become aware of the value of one's own work.
A linguist's leap into the world of professional translation: of languages, training, marketing and how a hobby became a profession that works for me and my clients.
Showing posts with label translation rates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label translation rates. Show all posts
3 November 2013
Establishing the freelance translation work you do not want to do, and standing by your decision
I was reading The Entrepreneurial Linguist, by Judy and Dagmar Jenner, a couple of days ago. And they mention one step in freelance translation that I had not consciously thought of before: defining the work you do not want to do.
When I started freelancing, I pretty much tried everything that came my way. I worked for peanuts, for agencies where I knew I would not have a long- or even medium-term future, I took jobs that I did not like, jobs where I could not possibly be competitive and jobs where it took me forever to deliver a translation just to the best of my ability, and I generally made a point of never saying no to a potential client.
The good thing about such things, of course, is that it does not take you long to realize where you have gone wrong and redress course. It is all part of the learning curve, and I think I learned a lot relatively fast. However, I like the Jenners' approach: I wish I had done things the other way around and actually sat down to define in advance a few things I did not want to get involved in.
When they are starting out, freelance translators often do not even know the going rate for their business. Even when they find out, they don't have a clue of where to find clients willing to pay them that much, how large or small the market (their market) may be, where they stand in this new world they did not even know existed, and even where their relative strengths and weaknesses may lay. And the natural thing is to try things out, gradually (though hopefully fast) learn what works for you and stick to that as a platform for growth.
However, now that I am a stretch further along that path, I wish I had devoted a couple of hours of my life to establishing what I did not want to do and developing a series of bottom-line policies.
Setting a rate below which one will not work is very hard to do right at the start of your freelance career: you usually do not have all the data necessary to make an informed decision. However, it does not take more than a couple of months, and may take much less, to find out at least a few of the things you need to know. It is important for you to have the courage to act accordingly.
No one is saying that you should not retain some flexibility, but it would be foolish not to make the most of the opportunities that are out there for you if only you look for them. No one will hire you for 15 cents a word if you will work for 3. And it is probably even true that no one worthwhile will hire you at all if the rates you set for yourself are ridiculously low. I still accept relatively low per-word rates occasionally, but only when I am certain that the job will be fast and painless and I can draw a decent hourly rate from it, and when I know the agency in question guarantees a healthy workflow, in terms both of work load and deadlines.
After about two months in the profession, I systematically turned down technical (cars, chemicals, and the like) and medical texts. They simply took me too long to research and left me seriously wondering whether I had actually done a good job rather than just a job. And, above all, I found I had no interest in pursuing them further so I might overcome my limitations and turn them into an area of specialization. It was never going to happen, and such translations and I were both better off without each other.
The Jenners talk about this as "non-specialization," and I find that, while freelance translators talk a lot about specialization, they do not give much attention to the opposite concept. For beginning freelance translators, non-specialization is in fact probably more important: specialization takes a long time, many years, but realizing what areas are out of bounds can probably be established within a few hours and save you many headaches.
By the way... the Jenners' book (for a taste, here is their blog, Translation Times) is explicitly written for people wishing to attract direct clients, which I am hoping to do. However, I would recommend portions of it for freelancers who work with agencies too: it provides some good insights on how to approach the business aspects of translation, particularly the assets that many of us hopefully have but are not consciously aware of.
When I started freelancing, I pretty much tried everything that came my way. I worked for peanuts, for agencies where I knew I would not have a long- or even medium-term future, I took jobs that I did not like, jobs where I could not possibly be competitive and jobs where it took me forever to deliver a translation just to the best of my ability, and I generally made a point of never saying no to a potential client.
The good thing about such things, of course, is that it does not take you long to realize where you have gone wrong and redress course. It is all part of the learning curve, and I think I learned a lot relatively fast. However, I like the Jenners' approach: I wish I had done things the other way around and actually sat down to define in advance a few things I did not want to get involved in.
When they are starting out, freelance translators often do not even know the going rate for their business. Even when they find out, they don't have a clue of where to find clients willing to pay them that much, how large or small the market (their market) may be, where they stand in this new world they did not even know existed, and even where their relative strengths and weaknesses may lay. And the natural thing is to try things out, gradually (though hopefully fast) learn what works for you and stick to that as a platform for growth.
However, now that I am a stretch further along that path, I wish I had devoted a couple of hours of my life to establishing what I did not want to do and developing a series of bottom-line policies.
Setting a rate below which one will not work is very hard to do right at the start of your freelance career: you usually do not have all the data necessary to make an informed decision. However, it does not take more than a couple of months, and may take much less, to find out at least a few of the things you need to know. It is important for you to have the courage to act accordingly.
No one is saying that you should not retain some flexibility, but it would be foolish not to make the most of the opportunities that are out there for you if only you look for them. No one will hire you for 15 cents a word if you will work for 3. And it is probably even true that no one worthwhile will hire you at all if the rates you set for yourself are ridiculously low. I still accept relatively low per-word rates occasionally, but only when I am certain that the job will be fast and painless and I can draw a decent hourly rate from it, and when I know the agency in question guarantees a healthy workflow, in terms both of work load and deadlines.
After about two months in the profession, I systematically turned down technical (cars, chemicals, and the like) and medical texts. They simply took me too long to research and left me seriously wondering whether I had actually done a good job rather than just a job. And, above all, I found I had no interest in pursuing them further so I might overcome my limitations and turn them into an area of specialization. It was never going to happen, and such translations and I were both better off without each other.
The Jenners talk about this as "non-specialization," and I find that, while freelance translators talk a lot about specialization, they do not give much attention to the opposite concept. For beginning freelance translators, non-specialization is in fact probably more important: specialization takes a long time, many years, but realizing what areas are out of bounds can probably be established within a few hours and save you many headaches.
By the way... the Jenners' book (for a taste, here is their blog, Translation Times) is explicitly written for people wishing to attract direct clients, which I am hoping to do. However, I would recommend portions of it for freelancers who work with agencies too: it provides some good insights on how to approach the business aspects of translation, particularly the assets that many of us hopefully have but are not consciously aware of.
29 October 2013
Two borrowed posts on rates that you probably should not miss
Rates do not just happen, as we all know (but may need reminding): you need to set them, set them well and keep pushing them up as you grow professionally. Translation agencies are surely not the best you can do when it comes to charity, so you should charge them as much as you can.
From the Patenttranslator's Blog, 10 Signs That Your Rate Per Translated Word May Be Too Low
From Thoughts On Translation, What is "the right rate" for your translation services?
And, while I am at it, here is another post I should have passed on weeks ago and did not. I thought and wrote about this at some length a few months ago, but the Patenttranslator's Blog clearly knows best: Is 50 Thousand Dollars Money Well Spent on a Translation Degree?
Enjoy!
From the Patenttranslator's Blog, 10 Signs That Your Rate Per Translated Word May Be Too Low
From Thoughts On Translation, What is "the right rate" for your translation services?
And, while I am at it, here is another post I should have passed on weeks ago and did not. I thought and wrote about this at some length a few months ago, but the Patenttranslator's Blog clearly knows best: Is 50 Thousand Dollars Money Well Spent on a Translation Degree?
Enjoy!
23 April 2013
Rates and productivity
I promise I will stop talking about freelance translation in business terms some time soon... but I really feel compelled to write about just one more thing: productivity.
Productivity is of course crucial for any business, but it is somewhat obscure and underrated in an activity where pricing takes the form of cents per word. Particularly as I started out, I took these things at face value: a job that paid me 10 cents per word was better than one that paid 5 cents per word, say. Now I know better.
Well, obviously a job that pays 10 cents per word is better than one that pays 5 cents per word ALL OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL. But real life hardly ever works like that. In fact, other things are usually very far from equal, and it is precisely those different details that tell you exactly which is the better job.
We all have to quote our rates in dollars or euros per word, since that is how the system works. However, in order to determine our particular rates or decide whether a particular job is well paid or not we need to do a lot of thinking of our own, with the specific job in mind.
How many words of that text can we translate per hour? How demanding, tiring or otherwise the particular translation will be? How long a break will we need by the end of it??? And, of course, what is the going rate for that project? These are just some of the questions we need to ask ourselves.
With a very easy text in my top language pairs I can translate about 1,000 words per hour. At 0.05 dollars per word that is 50 dollars per hour. In my weaker language pairs and with more difficult material I will not translate much more than 500 words per hour, so I will need 0.10 dollars per word to make 50 dollars per hour. I'll need a long break at the end, and if anything goes even mildly wrong I may have to burn some midnight oil.
When you make pricing decisions, be it by setting your own rate or accepting that imposed by potential clients, you need to take this whole process into account. It is not about how much you are charging your client but about how much you are earning yourself, and that is all about your own productivity for the job in question.
I have one client that I highly value. I would actually go as far as to say say they are one of my best clients, even though they only pay 0.05 dollars per word for regular assignments. Now that rate is obviously not one reason why I value them as a client, and in fact most of my other clients pay me at least double that. However, this particular client guarantees around 70,000 words per year of translation work, which is at least 3,500 dollars (they occasionally pay higher rates for more difficult texts).
With this client, I don't have to worry about tight deadlines, late nights or anything like that: they have mostly small projects to take or leave on the spur of the moment which do not compete at all with anything else I may have to do. Assignments are usually incredibly easy, and therefore quick. My productivity with them is extremely high. And I wouldn't dream of bidding on a project I don't feel like doing. To my mind, this particular client is basically paying me 3,500 dollars per year for effortless translation. So yes, I like them.
I have also done plenty of jobs for much higher rates that I have had to slog over. There is no question in my opinion as to which is the better job. I usually take both kinds, since they are not in direct competition with each other and since, well, more money is generally better than less. But this situation is a good case in point.
Productivity also provides a crucial way to increase your earnings as a freelance translator. You should certainly increase your nominal rates as far as you possibly can: you are providing a service and your clients should expect to pay what it is worth.
However, you should also aim to increase your productivity, to increase that crucial output per hour and with it your real rate for any nominal rate. You can do that among other things by finetuning your portfolio and specializing in the language pairs and the fields of expertise that your are really best at. You can do other types of work too, but since the client just wants to get back a good translation and does not really care how long it took you to do it, you will need to bear the cost of that.
Productivity is of course crucial for any business, but it is somewhat obscure and underrated in an activity where pricing takes the form of cents per word. Particularly as I started out, I took these things at face value: a job that paid me 10 cents per word was better than one that paid 5 cents per word, say. Now I know better.
Well, obviously a job that pays 10 cents per word is better than one that pays 5 cents per word ALL OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL. But real life hardly ever works like that. In fact, other things are usually very far from equal, and it is precisely those different details that tell you exactly which is the better job.
We all have to quote our rates in dollars or euros per word, since that is how the system works. However, in order to determine our particular rates or decide whether a particular job is well paid or not we need to do a lot of thinking of our own, with the specific job in mind.
How many words of that text can we translate per hour? How demanding, tiring or otherwise the particular translation will be? How long a break will we need by the end of it??? And, of course, what is the going rate for that project? These are just some of the questions we need to ask ourselves.
With a very easy text in my top language pairs I can translate about 1,000 words per hour. At 0.05 dollars per word that is 50 dollars per hour. In my weaker language pairs and with more difficult material I will not translate much more than 500 words per hour, so I will need 0.10 dollars per word to make 50 dollars per hour. I'll need a long break at the end, and if anything goes even mildly wrong I may have to burn some midnight oil.
When you make pricing decisions, be it by setting your own rate or accepting that imposed by potential clients, you need to take this whole process into account. It is not about how much you are charging your client but about how much you are earning yourself, and that is all about your own productivity for the job in question.
I have one client that I highly value. I would actually go as far as to say say they are one of my best clients, even though they only pay 0.05 dollars per word for regular assignments. Now that rate is obviously not one reason why I value them as a client, and in fact most of my other clients pay me at least double that. However, this particular client guarantees around 70,000 words per year of translation work, which is at least 3,500 dollars (they occasionally pay higher rates for more difficult texts).
With this client, I don't have to worry about tight deadlines, late nights or anything like that: they have mostly small projects to take or leave on the spur of the moment which do not compete at all with anything else I may have to do. Assignments are usually incredibly easy, and therefore quick. My productivity with them is extremely high. And I wouldn't dream of bidding on a project I don't feel like doing. To my mind, this particular client is basically paying me 3,500 dollars per year for effortless translation. So yes, I like them.
I have also done plenty of jobs for much higher rates that I have had to slog over. There is no question in my opinion as to which is the better job. I usually take both kinds, since they are not in direct competition with each other and since, well, more money is generally better than less. But this situation is a good case in point.
Productivity also provides a crucial way to increase your earnings as a freelance translator. You should certainly increase your nominal rates as far as you possibly can: you are providing a service and your clients should expect to pay what it is worth.
However, you should also aim to increase your productivity, to increase that crucial output per hour and with it your real rate for any nominal rate. You can do that among other things by finetuning your portfolio and specializing in the language pairs and the fields of expertise that your are really best at. You can do other types of work too, but since the client just wants to get back a good translation and does not really care how long it took you to do it, you will need to bear the cost of that.
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