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Corinne McKay

Some thoughts on rates and quotes

I really enjoyed reading The Freelancery’s recent post on whether or not to publish your freelance rates on your website. Since my website redesign a few years ago, I’ve struggled with this same dilemma: I grow weary of preparing quotes for clients whose budget turns out to be 1/3 of what I charge, so I post my rates on my website. Then I feel like having posted rates is too restrictive and doesn’t steer the conversation toward value for money, so I take my rates down. Here’s my current line of reasoning, which is, of course, subject to change!

No question about it, handling inquiries from prospective clients who have little to no budget can be draining. Sometimes the slim to nonexistent funding isn’t mentioned until 25 minutes into the phone conversation (this happened to me recently), and sometimes it’s brought up with a tone of righteous indignation on the prospective client’s part (“If you can’t do it for $25 an hour, our marketing manager’s son who studied abroad in Belgium will be happy to do it for $15”). It’s just a bummer to spend so much time talking to prospective clients who expect so much for so little. However, I agree with The Freelancery’s suggestion that these interactions are also opportunities: maybe an opportunity to refer work to a beginning translator who charges less, maybe an opportunity to mention that professional translators don’t generally work for what the client’s budget is, etc. In the end, I do think that we perform a service on behalf of the profession when we have these types of conversations.

In terms of posted rates, I feel that I’ve found somewhat of a happy medium that works for me.

  • I removed my general “Rates” page from my website and I ask prospective clients to call or e-mail for a quote. However, I don’t prepare a detailed quote until they confirm that my rates are at least somewhat within their budget. This avoids the time-suck of preparing a full quote only to find out that the client’s budget is less than half of what I charge.
  • I left my rates for “fixed-price” items on my website. For example for certified translations of official documents, I always charge $50 per page for the translation and $15 for a notarized certification, and most of these clients are first-time, one-time clients. The Freelancery’s post hits this one on the head (and they mention translation in their examples!); clients who want their birth certificate translated into English don’t want to call for a quote, they just want it done fast and for a not exorbitant amount of money. My rate to translate official documents might be more expensive than some other freelancers, but I know it’s much cheaper than most agencies’ minimum charges, so I feel fine about posting it.

In closing, although I think of myself as a kind and understanding person and as someone who tries to be helpful whenever it’s possible, two aspects of rates and quoting really raise my blood pressure. I’ll admit them publicly in order to get them off my chest:

  1. Why do so many prospective clients seem to lose the ability to do math when it comes to translation quotes? If I give the example that at 25 cents per word, a full page of single-spaced text would cost approximately $125 to translate, why is it then a surprise that a 10-page document costs $1,250 to translate?
  2. Why do so many prospective clients feel that it should take a couple of hours to translate something that took months or even years to write? I get this a lot from authors: “But the book is so short! It will really take you 10 hours to translate it?” I can’t decide whether it would be helpful or nasty to ask if it really took them more than 10 hours to write the book, but I try to just answer the question objectively since I enjoy doing literary translation and working with authors.

Feel free to add your own observations on rates and quotes too (or associated issues that you need to get off your chest!). Thanks for listening, I feel so much better.


Corinne McKay

5 things to do before 2012

Hello readers! Thoughts on Translation is back from an incredible two weeks in Costa Rica: we visited Corcovado National Park and the Arenal volcano area and it was truly amazing. I highly recommend Corcovado Adventures Tent Camp and the Sirena ranger station for a truly off-the-beaten-track experience. Think wild tapirs wandering down the beach and 10-foot crocodiles floating in the surf (seriously!). We rented a small but beautiful house in Arenal and had a lot of fun rafting with Costa Rica Descents, paddleboarding with Desafio and zip-lining with EcoGlide; I skipped their famous Tarzan Swing but my husband and my daughter loved it! And now…it’s seven degrees here in Colorado and we have eight inches of snow in our front yard. I’m not completely sure why we came back from Costa Rica but there’s plenty of translating to be done, so I’m trying to focus on the positive and look forward to ski season!

While I was on vacation, I started thinking about wrapping up 2011 and setting goals for 2012. I’ve assembled a list of five things I think every freelance translator should do before 2012, and I hope that you’ll add your own in the comments! Addendum: In catching up on Google Reader, I just found this post on the same topic from Sara Freitas-Maltaverne. Excellent suggestions for those who read French!

  1. Do a searching and fearless assessment of 2011. Did you meet your financial goals or did you fall short? Did you finish the major items on your business to-do list or are they still taunting you from the sticky note on your monitor? Think about what needs to change. If you’re like me, some of the same goals appear on your goal list over and over. It took me years (literally) to realize that when that happens, it means that my current method for achieving those goals is irreparably broken. For example I had been trying to finish the second edition of my book for literally three years. Finally I decided that I just had to block out an hour a day and treat that time as sacrosanct, only to be used to work on the book. I won’t say it was easy to follow through on that, but the project got finished! So if you keep saying you’re going to… (upgrade your computer, learn a new TM tool, use your speech recognition software more, attend more client networking events, have a face-to-face meeting with at least one client a month, or whatever) and it hasn’t happened yet, don’t just write it on the list for 2012, make a new plan for actually accomplishing it.
  2. Make any end-of-year purchases or contributions. Before you make your final tax payment for 2011, it’s a good time to burn some money out of the business account if you have a surplus. If you pay your 2012 professional association membership dues before December 31, you can deduct them from your 2011 income. If you need a new piece of durable goods (printer, expensive software, office furniture, netbook, etc.), you can decrease your 2011 taxable income by buying it now. Ditto with contributions to most, although not all, retirement accounts. I have an individual 401K for my corporation, which has the advantage of having a very high contribution limit but the disadvantage that the withdrawals will probably be taxed as ordinary income once I’m old enough to take money out of the account. Other investment vehicles such as the Roth IRA work in the opposite manner: your contribution may not be tax-deducible, but your withdrawals may be. Definitely ask your accountant or financial planner about the pluses and minuses of various year-end contributions.
  3. Get your 2011 deductions in order. Make sure that if you are claiming more than $600 of subcontracting expenses to any one person or corporation, you get their tax data and send them a 1099. And make sure to claim every legal deduction that you can. I don’t like to stretch the rules, but I’m always finding new deductions that I was unaware of. This year’s: if you have kids age 12 or under, you may be able to deduct up to $3,000 of summer day camp costs per child as work-related dependent care. Make sure to get the camp’s tax ID information and make sure that you meet the requirements for the deduction; for example in most cases you cannot claim any work-related dependent care expenses (day care, summer camp or otherwise) if your spouse doesn’t work, and if your kids go to sleepaway camp, you may have to research whether the deduction applies.
  4. Decide whether you are going to raise your rates. I find that with my agency clients, it’s helpful to raise my rates a little bit every year rather than trying to impose a large increase all at once. If you’ve been thinking of raising your rates, the end of the year provides a good reason to do so. You can even prepare a rate sheet with your 2012 rates and send it out to your clients individually.
  5. And of course…start setting your goals for 2012! Whether it’s to earn more, work less, diversify your client base, upgrade your skills or attend some new conferences, now is the time to think about next year. Think about how quickly 2011 went: doesn’t it seem like a short time ago that you were setting your 2011 goals?

Overall I feel quite positive about 2011. In contrast with the larger world economy, the translation industry is still booming and I’ve had as much work as I could handle for most of the year. In terms of goals, I finally (finally!) polished off the second edition of my book, but I could have done more with my direct client marketing campaign. That’s the other advantage of reviewing 2011 in early December: still three weeks left to salvage those lingering to-do items!


Corinne McKay

Some thoughts on professional photographs

Thanks to Chris Durban for suggesting this post topic!

Let’s say that you want to hire a professional services provider: maybe a business accountant, a copyright attorney, a web designer or a marketing consultant. You’re clicking through that person’s website, and on their About page, you see a photograph. Great! It’s always helpful to get a visual image of the person you’re thinking of working with. But then you notice that the person’s photograph is clearly from 20+ years ago, or was obviously taken in a drugstore photo booth, or features them and their pet ferret, or you can’t really tell what the person looks like because they’re facing away from the camera and their hair is in their eyes. Problem? Maybe! Let’s ponder the issue of professional photographs for a second.

I had never used a professional photograph until about a year ago. My previous head shot photos were decent (hair brushed, facing the camera, no ferrets) but clearly not taken by a professional. I told myself that a) it doesn’t really matter, I’m just a freelancer; b) a professional photo session is outside my budget and c) how different will the photo look anyway? Then, Judy Jenner gave our local translators’ association the idea of hiring a professional photographer to do head shots of a bunch of our members during one session. Eve Bodeux organized this and it was a huge success. Our photographer did head shots of 12 people in two hours at a cost of $40 per person, and we were really pleased with the results. Since then I’ve been using the picture I had taken during that session, and I do think that it’s an asset to my marketing materials. So, why should you consider a professional photograph?

  • It shows that you’re willing to invest in your business. I am very frugal. I don’t own a clothes dryer and I wash Ziploc bags. But when someone hands me a business card with “Get your free business cards at…” printed on the back, my immediate reaction is that this person is not even willing to invest $25 in their business in order to get real cards. Ditto with the professional photograph: it shows that you care.
  • It conveys an impression of you as a person. Let’s face it: working with a freelancer is a very personal relationship. And if people don’t have a positive impression of you, they are less likely to work with you. A professional photograph can help establish you as approachable, personable, likable and other qualities that are desirable in a business associate.
  • It’s what other people do. I hate to play the “everyone else is doing it” card, but there’s some truth to this. If you consider yourself on par with other consultant-type service providers, your marketing materials need to be at that level.

When you’re having your photo taken, it’s also worth thinking about the image that you want to convey to your potential clients. For example at our local photo session, at least one member was concerned that she looks too young (clients think she is inexperienced/don’t take her seriously) and at least one was concerned that she looks too old (clients think she is outdated). Our photographer had some good suggestions on how to stage and pose the photograph in order to counter those impressions. In addition, I think that professional photographers really are better at putting you at ease during the photo session. I dislike having my picture taken and I don’t think I’ve very photogenic, but I was very happy with the photos that I got from this session.

Any other thoughts on professional photos?


Corinne McKay

What about TM discounts?

During the recent discussion on volume discounts, a number of readers brought up the (very valid) issue of translation memory discounts. I feel a can of worms about to open here, but I’ll inject some of my thoughts on TM discounts.

First caveat: I am neither a huge fan of nor a heavy user of TM. I own and use both OmegaT and Wordfast, and I really like both of them for different reasons. However because my favorite kind of work is translation that requires excellent writing, I only use TM when necessary. I find that because of the “chunked” nature of working in a TM tool, the flow of my writing really suffers when I use one. I do gain a pretty significant speed advantage when using TM, but I find that if the document needs to sound really natural in English, the extra editing time eats up the time I saved during the translation.

That being said, there are some projects where it would be suicidal not to use a TM. I work on several recurring projects for international development entities. These might involve multiple countries submitting funding applications using the same template, so it would be a huge waste of time to start each application from scratch. In those cases, I’m all about TM leverage.

There are two basic sides to the TM discount debate:

  • Agency says: if some of the content in this document is recycled from a TM that we provide, why should we pay the translator’s full rate for the recycled portion? The TM is the result of work that we paid for originally, so we want to realize the benefit of it.
  • Translator says: I purchased the TM tool and used my own time to learn to use it. I pay for the upgrades and for the computer system that runs the TM. The time that I save by using the TM is a result of this investment, and I want to realize the benefit of it.

Over the years, I’ve struggled with the issue of TM discounts. In some specializations (i.e. software and documentation), the situation may be different from what I experience. But I find that editing fuzzy matches (i.e. anything below 100%) takes at least as long and sometimes longer than just translating the segment from scratch. Therefore, the only TM discount that I offer is that if the client is extremely confident in the reliability of the TM that they provide, I will not charge for 100% matches if I accept them without proofreading them. Meaning that in Wordfast Classic, if a segment shows up green (Wordfast’s color code for a 100% match), I just click Alt-down (Wordfast’s command for accepting a segment) without reading it. I feel that for clients who put in the work to maintain a reliable TM, this is a fair compromise. But because I’ve run the numbers on the time it takes to edit fuzzy matches, I don’t offer TM discounts other than this.

Other thoughts?