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Greetings, Training for Translators readers, I hope you’re all doing well!

Upcoming four-week classes

Our next set of four-week classes is open for registration! Getting Started as a Freelance Translator or Interpreter…in the age of AI (“That was an AMAZING class!! Even though I‘m not new to translation, there was still so much worthwhile information,” says a past participant) runs from September 9 to October 4, and Direct client marketing launch pad (“I liked the methodical organization of the class, starting with gathering information on clients who may need your services, and then moving on to contacting clients,” says a past participant) runs from November 4-29. 

Registration for either class is $195, $30 discount for ATA members, you have access to the course materials for six months, and you also receive access to my monthly free alumni question and answer sessions. I hope to see you there!

This week’s topic: Pros and cons of pricing by the word, by the project, and by the hour

Pricing is stressful, no matter how long you’ve been freelancing. Recently, I had two interpreting clients offer more money than what I asked for. Ugh! I’m the one who teaches classes about these things, and still, I probably left money on the table.

Today, let’s talk about pricing translations (not interpreting, a totally different topic) by the word, by the project, and by the hour.

Pricing by the word

There are lots of disadvantages to pricing by the word, and yet it remains the standard in the translation world. Why? Partially because of habit (this is the way we do it, because this is the way we’ve always done it), and partially because it’s totally straightforward. That’s the main advantage of pricing by the word: particularly if you price by the source word, everyone knows ahead of time how much the translation is going to cost. At 20 cents per word, a 1,000-word translation is going to cost $200, whether it takes the translator two hours or ten hours to do it, which has some advantages:

• The client knows ahead of time how much the translation is going to cost
• The translator has an incentive to specialize/become more efficient (this also has a downside, more on that below), and more experienced translators tend to earn more, because they work more quickly

My sense is that per-word pricing hangs on because it’s simple. But it has some significant downsides:

• Clients (not the kinds of clients you want to work for) may try to split hairs over the word count: different tools count words in surprisingly different manners; the source and target word counts may be very, very different (with the translator wanting the higher count and the client wanting the lower count); the client may want to subtract repeated text, and so on. At the start of my career when I was taking pretty much any work I could get, I even had clients who wanted to not pay for things like proper names and numbers (“because they don’t have to be translated”). All of this is really frustrating from the translator’s point of view.
• The translator has an incentive to rush, or to take on too much work in order to make more money. Lots of translators do not work like this, but it’s just an economic fact: there’s a disincentive to take half an hour to research a term, when you’re getting paid in cents per word.
• The translator is penalized for spending extra time on the translation. This is one reason I often say, you actually do your clients a favor when you charge a rate at which you feel that you’re being paid fairly. You do the client no favors if you’re sitting there thinking, I’m not going down a rabbit hole of research, because I simply can’t afford to.

How about per-project?

Per-project pricing is honestly my favorite way to price. It gives the client one number to focus on (“How much is this going to cost?”), and it saves the translator from committing to a per-word rate that applies to all situations. Lots of translators wonder, can I adjust my rate when the source document is an un-editable PDF that I have to recreate in Word? What if the source text is particularly dense or technical? What if it’s slightly rush but not hair-on-fire rush? Per-project pricing solves all of these issues.

In my opinion, the only issue with per-project pricing is that it can seem opaque to the client. Some clients will ask, what is this rate based on/where did it come from? That’s not a reason not to use per-project pricing, because it’s easy enough to explain to the client that your quotes involve various factors: length, format, difficulty, deadline, etc. but it’s something to be prepared for.

Hourly?

Interestingly enough, hourly billing is probably the most common increment in many professional service sectors, but the least common in the translation world. Attorneys, accountants, language teachers, software trainers, editors…they mostly bill by the hour. Billing by the hour is transparent for the client, and guarantees that the translator will be paid for all of his/her time. What’s not to love! Well, hourly pricing has one major downside: either the translator or the client has to absorb some uncertainty:

• If the translator says, “A 1,000-word translation will take me three hours,” then the client feels secure about how much it’s going to cost, but the translator is taking a risk, and that can go both ways. Maybe this translation takes two hours, or maybe it takes four hours. If the translator commits up-front to a number of hours, that’s not a whole lot different than charging by the word
• If the translator says, “A 1,000-word translation will take me between two and four hours,” the client may get nervous. Let’s say the translator charges $90 an hour. There’s a big difference between $180 and $360, and the client won’t know the final amount until the translator sends the bill. Apply that principle to a 30,000-word project, and you understand why hourly billing has some issues.

I don’t have a definite answer to this question, but especially if you work for direct clients, it’s up to you to decide how to bill them. Michael Schubert, a German to English translator whose business advice I really admire, observed (correctly, I think) that most translators default to per-word pricing, even with direct clients, while most clients “don’t know to count words until we teach them to count words.” Food for thought!

Lately, I’ve gotten multiple versions of a similar question from readers and students:

• “I feel like ‘pure translation’ may be fading away, or at least the translation world is really changing”
• “And I’d like to perhaps pursue a new niche”
• “But I’m not sure how to go about it. Should I go back to school, work for free, try a bunch of different things, or something else?”

It’s a huge topic, but let’s take a stab at it!

Is pure translation fading away?

This is a huge and complicated question, because it depends on how you define “pure translation” and who you work for. But I do agree that the work that was the backbone of the industry when I started out in 2002: high-volume translation for mid-market agencies, paid at a decent per-word rate (which I would define as 12 cents per word or more; I don’t work for less than 15 cents), is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, or at least a lot less common. Many or even most mid-market agencies have moved to machine translation + post-editing (MTPE) wherever it’s feasible (meaning that a computer can read the files and produce a translation that is good enough to be cleaned up by a human). Most agency employees I talk to say that this is for a simple reason: the bulk of their clients seem happy with the results of this process, and are very focused on price and speed. That, in and of itself, is another huge topic: does this mean that the new “quality standard” in translation is, “If the client doesn’t complain, the translation was fine”? That may merit its own newsletter, and there are certainly languages and specializations where MT is still relatively useless, and there are highly visible projects like marketing campaigns, annual reports, website copy, etc. that really have to be perfect. But in general, we seem to be in an era where “good enough is good enough” for many translation clients.

Is this true in my business?

For what it’s worth, my translation work is pretty much holding steady (no major increase, no major decrease), for a few reasons:

• I hit the rates wall with most agencies a long time ago, before the AI wall was an issue. I’ve really never worked for less than 14-15 cents per word, which priced me out of the French to English agency market starting probably six or seven years ago.
• I was never a heavy translation technology user, and thus I’ve always worked with clients who weren’t super technology-focused. I’ve used Trados for probably 15 years, but TM was never my favorite way to work, and MT even less so, which resulted in a base of clients who aren’t that concerned with technology.

What’s growing? What niches might you want to pursue?

This is by no means an exhaustive list, and there are exceptions all over the place. But, here are some general categories of freelancers in the language professions that I see doing well right now:

• Anyone who works in a specialization that AI can’t handle. This is a huge range: I think that books are too nuanced, official documents are too hard to read, and topics like medical research or scientific journal articles are too complicated. There’s really no over-arching rule that defines what MT can handle and what it can’t, but there are a lot of areas that it can’t!
• High-end editors. Here I’m not talking about post-editing machine translation for $25 an hour. I’m talking about clients who want to (maybe) save some time by starting with an MT draft that is then polished by a really good editor, or writers whose language skills are good enough that they don’t need a translator, but they need a really good editor. Here I’m talking about people charging probably $75-$150 an hour.
• Audiovisual translators. Weirdly enough, I know a lot of subtitlers and transcriptionists who are doing quite well. I say “weirdly enough,” because I think a lot of people assume that a/v will be completely absorbed by AI, but honestly that doesn’t seem to be the case so far.
• People who work with direct clients who want the job done by hand. This is most of my direct clients, and all of my law firm clients. They use very little technology themselves, so they’re not interested in a technology-leveraged translation process. I know that it’s the opposite situation with many large law firms that have jumped 100% on the DeepL bandwagon, but my law firm clients (mostly one or two attorneys working for themselves) are totally not interested in MT.
• Specialized writers and copywriters. Copywriting and content marketing writing has been hit hard by AI, in similar ways to translation. Google’s new AI mode, otherwise known as “Google does the googling for you” is, or will soon be, a huge hit to online content creators, whereby if you search “yoga poses for back pain,” you’ll simply get an AI-generated summary, rather than links to yoga content websites. And yet, this creates a ton of new opportunities for highly specialized writers to write things like e-mail newsletters that are sent directly to subscribers. I’m really, really glad that I’ve put a lot of effort into growing and maintaining my e-mail list, so that I can send you human-written, (hopefully) relevant content, straight to your inbox. Lots of businesses need writers to do that kind of thing, or they need writers who specialize in annual reports, or sustainability reports, or academic journal articles, or making blog posts into infographics (and on and on).
• Interpreters. It’s just true! As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, I think that fully automated interpreting will exist someday, and I think we’re seeing more clients patching together some workarounds. I gave an example of how I lost an interpreting client who decided to start using MT-generated captions on their videos (IMO a bad idea, but they went ahead with it!). But in general, I think most interpreters are doing quite well, in terms of rates and volume. I recently acquired two new interpreting clients, and both of them offered to pay more than what I asked for (and right, I’m the one who’s always talking about asking for more money!).

So, then what?

If you’d like to pursue a new niche, you have a few options.

• You could go back to school. When I decided to pursue interpreting in a serious way, I knew that I would never have the confidence to work for high-level clients unless I did a Master’s in conference interpreting, so that’s what I did, and it was 100% worth it.
• You could pursue training that’s not a university-based program. There are lots of entities like HubSpot Academy, the Editorial Freelancers Association, ACES, the Society for Technical Communication, Ooona, Copyblogger and many others that offer online and in-person training in “adjacent” fields that might be of interest to translators (those are not endorsements, just examples!).
• You could try the “old clients, new service” approach. It’s always hard to determine when you’re ready to offer a new service, but you’re much more likely to succeed in a new service with a client who already trusts you. If you want to try ghostwriting, you could propose writing some white papers for the CEO of a client you already translate for. If you want to try content writing, maybe some of your existing clients have newsletters but they’re not great, or they should have a newsletter but they don’t. Maybe you translate for a non-profit that needs a grant writer. New services for existing clients are a good place to start.
• You could do pro bono work. I have mixed feelings about working for free, but I think that offering free services where you’re helping a worthy organization and gaining experience in a niche you want to pursue, is an OK idea. The first key is to place some limits on what you’re offering: “I’d like to write your newsletter for three months,” “I’d like to rework the text on your Home and About pages,” “I’d like to write five blog posts for you.” The other key is to get as much benefit as possible for yourself: ask the pro bono client for a LinkedIn recommendation; ask them to put your name on everything you work on for them (“French version of our newsletter created by Julie Roy”), ask if you can use them as a reference.
• You could work for low pay, on a short-term basis. This is obviously a horrible long-term idea. If you look for low-paying work, there’s a ton of it out there, and you’ll soon be burnt out and miserable! But it’s not the worst way to test the waters of a new niche. Years ago, I thought I wanted to do more blog writing, so I did a few projects on Upwork. There are tons of online trainings on how to do this, but bidding on jobs on Upwork means that the work is right there, you’re not sending out cold e-mails, and it’s generally low-commitment: someone who wants one or two blog posts. The client reviews your services on Upwork so you have a nice testimonial right there; I wouldn’t get stuck there forever, and I would personally never work for less than around $40 an hour, even “just for the experience,” but it’s an option. I burned out on this pretty quickly because most clients wanted someone to generate a massive flow of traffic from three blog posts, but it was an interesting experience.
• You could try to get a referral to a high-end client. Most of us are terrified to use our personal networks to help us find clients. And yet, we all have “that” friend, or even more than one of them! That friend who used to work for a Senator and has tons of political connections; that friend whose spouse is a partner in a really successful law firm; that friend who just sold their startup for a gazillion dollars; that friend who was employee number six at a company that’s now trading at a gazillion dollars a share. You’d be surprised at what a referral from someone like that can do for you, and how few questions the person they’re referring you will ask. This is sort of the opposite of the Upwork strategy: just aim for the $200 an hour clients right out of the gate, and it’s sometimes easier than the more crowded markets.

If you’re thinking about if or how to pursue a new niche, I hope that these tips are helpful! It’s kind of a weird time in the freelance translation and interpreting world; feel free to comment below if you have anything you’d like to add.

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Following are answers to some questions I’ve recently received from blog readers and students; I hope they’re helpful!

Q: If you live in the U.S., what’s the best way to be paid by international clients?
A: I’ve ranted about this a bunch of times on my blog. Because the U.S. banking system is stuck in the 1950s (and that may be a generous estimate), there is no commonly accepted, inexpensive way to get paid by clients outside the U.S., unlike SEPA, the Single Euro Payments Area. The vast majority of U.S. bank accounts don’t even have IBAN numbers, the system that the rest of the world uses to identify bank accounts. Thus, you’re stuck with picking the least-bad option for you. For me, this is usually an international wire transfer into my business bank account, for which I pay a flat fee of $15 (this is at Chase). Typically, I pay my banking fees and the client pays theirs, but for international clients for whom I do a lot of work, I have them deduct their wire transfer costs from my payment, so that they’re not penalized for working with me. My accountant feels that the Wise borderless account would be classified as a “foreign account” under FATCA, (this is a grey area and your accountant may have a different opinion) so I don’t use that, and several of my clients will not use Wise to transfer money to me (which I would prefer, because it comes in as a domestic ACH transfer, for free) because Wise isn’t a bank and thus lacks some banking legal protections. I do accept credit card payments from international clients and I just eat the fee for that. Basically, it’s a mess, but typically I accept wire transfers or credit cards.

Q: How much do publishers usually pay for book translations?
A: I’ve translated six non-fiction books: four for traditional publishers, one for a private business press, and one for a self-published author. All of the traditional publishers have framed the payment as a lump sum that worked out to about 10 US cents per word. The nice thing about a traditional publisher is that they typically have their own editor (in-house or on contract), which can be a big factor when you work with a self-published author. In my experience, editing costs are often where book translation projects involving self-published authors break down: not many editors want to work for a discounted rate just because the project is interesting, and not many self-published authors want to, or can add roughly 30% to the cost of the translation to hire an editor.

Q: Is it a good idea to use a tracking tool like Streak to determine if people open your marketing e-mails?
A: Objectively, sure. Especially if you’re using different e-mail scripts or targeting different types of clients, it’s great to have some data on who’s reading what. But you also have to consider the emotional impact of all of this data, as described in this article by a freelancer who used Streak. If you’re at all insecure about your marketing efforts (which means, basically, 99.9% of freelancers), you want to think about a tool like Streak before you use it: someone opens your e-mail multiple times and never responds; a direct referral from a friend never opens your e-mail; you can’t stop checking whether your dream client has opened it yet. In some cases, more data isn’t better, it’s purely a nexus of anxiety that serves no purpose.

Q: Is interpreting more future-proof than translation? Should we all become interpreters if we want to work in the language professions for another 20 years?
A: It’s complicated! Hopefully you were expecting that answer. I do think that, overall, we’re a long way away from, “Put on this magic headset and listen to the judge in Spanish.” I think that day will come, but probably not in the working lifetimes of those of us who are active in the language professions today. However, there are a lot of other factors to consider. We’re already seeing clients using workarounds for interpreting. I lost an interpreting client like that, last year: I had been recording an English voice track for their French corporate training videos, and they decided to go to an automated captioning tool for the French version, with machine-translated captions for the English. A bad idea, in my opinion, but they went ahead with it. Interpreting definitely isn’t immune to AI incursion, and you also have to consider that interpreting is still at least somewhat location-dependent even when you work remotely, because you still have the time zone factor. I get offered a fair bit of remote interpreting work for Europe, but I’m eight hours behind Central European Time and I don’t want to work the graveyard shift. All this with the caveat that I love interpreting and I really enjoy the translation/interpreting combo; just some things to think about!

Q: How can we fire an annoying client in a polite way? Is it OK to raise our rates until either the client drops us, or at least we feel fairly compensated for how aggravating they are to work for?
A: Absolutely! A former agency project manager in my online course alumni group always says, “The higher the annoyance fee, the greater the chance that the client will pay it.” And this has proven true in my own business! Most importantly, you never owe a client an explanation of why you don’t want to work with them anymore, unless you have some sort of ongoing contract with them. Just tell them you’re “not available” until they stop asking. But I fully support the option of simply raising your rates until the client stops contacting you, or you think, “This is an amount of money that fully compensates me for my irritation.”

Q: Is LinkedIn Premium worth paying for?
A: Erk. Maybe? The issue here is that LinkedIn, like many social media platforms, keeps limiting various features on the free account. Some of these limits aren’t that big of a deal; I personally can live without seeing who’s been viewing my profile (see above, in reference to data that may cause you anxiety with no benefit). But to me, personalized LinkedIn connection requests are key to any outreach campaign on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn recently limited most users to only five personalized connection requests per month. So, you have a few choices: first, I would do the free month of LinkedIn Premium (it’s easy to sign up for and easy to cancel) and see where that gets you. Second, I would do the math and figure out the return on investment for Premium. All of these subscription fees do add up, but in most countries, a year of LinkedIn Premium Career (the basic Premium level) is going to run you less than US $250 if you pay for the whole year, and even if you found one client on LinkedIn, you’d already be ahead of the game.

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This month’s free resource is a set of slides to help you do a mid-year review of your business. You have enough data to see where things are headed in your business, and enough time to course-correct before the end of the year.

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