Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Rates


Corinne McKay

Doing things for money versus doing things for fun

Last year, Walt Kania of The Freelancery wrote a fantastic post called Follow your passion? Maybe not. Try this instead, and the whole “follow your passion” idea is one that I think about a lot. Some thoughts:

I love translating, writing and teaching, and I can’t imagine having a job where I was just warming the chair all day and waiting for quitting time. So in that sense, I agree that following your passion is a good thing: I’ve always loved languages, words and writing. However, I also think that if you want a satisfying quality of life, money has to enter into the equation somewhere. And somewhere, there’s an intersection between what you like to do and what people will pay money, or maybe even a lot of money for. So when I hear other translators comment that they fantasize about finding a job where they don’t have to sit in front of a computer all day, one of my standard suggestions is “If you like everything else about being a translator, raise your rates and work less, so that you can have more time to do whatever you want.”

Here’s another truth, at least as I see it. Lots of things are fun if, or because, you don’t have to depend on them to pay the bills. For example when I think about my non-work passions: crafting, gardening, cooking, mountain sports, to name a few, they are things from which I could potentially earn income. Case in point: I love to knit, and last year I made a series of ponchos, like the one Martha Stewart wore when she got out of jail. A few days ago I was wearing the one I made for myself, and a stranger asked me where I got it; then commented that I “could charge a lot of money” making them for other people. But here’s the thing: it’s not that I don’t want to earn money from crafting, it’s that part of why I find crafting relaxing is that I do it purely because I want to, not because I’m on a deadline or filling an order. Ditto for many of my other non-work passions; I love long-distance bicycle touring, and I’m sure that there are people making money running or leading those kids of tours. But for me, part of the mental release of being on my bike is that I literally don’t think about anything besides turning the cranks. I’m not stressing out about who’s having fun, who has a flat tire, and who can’t make it over the next pass. If I were leading bike tours just for fun, it might work, but I wouldn’t want to depend on it to buy groceries.

Around the same time as the poncho interaction, I went to see our financial planner, and he and I got to talking about this (following your passion, not knitting ponchos) as well. Interestingly enough, he had just read an article on a financial planning website that corroborated the “don’t follow your passion as a job; earn enough money that you can work less and have more time for the passion” philosophy. Apparently this referred to an unscientific study of people who quit their white-collar jobs to become rafting guides or rug weavers, or whatever their previous avocational interest was. And many of these people found that once the passion became their job, it was, well…a job. I would hazard a guess that in any type of job, there are many of the same stresses: meeting deadlines, meeting customers’ expectations, finding the energy and drive to pull rabbits out of hats when valued clients really need it.  To me, my non-work passions provide the recharge that I need to work very hard at a job that I enjoy. But if given the choice between knitting all day and translating all day, I’d rather translate, make a bunch of money doing it, and then have the rest of my time free to knit, ski or grow flowers just because I want to.


Corinne McKay

Billing by the word, the hour or the project

This topic started out as a Twitter discussion earlier this week, and I’m hoping that the translators who contributed there will join in here too! At the recent ATA conference, there was a lot of buzz about how translators should charge; not just the actual amounts, but whether it’s better to charge by the word, by the hour or by the project. So here’s a starter post to get the discussion going! It’s also worth noting that a post on the same topic that I wrote way back in 2008 is still one of the most popular posts on this blog, so clearly it’s a timeless topic! Here we go:

  • Charging by the word still seems to be the norm in our industry, at least in the agency market. On the plus side, if you charge by the source word count, everyone knows in advance exactly how much the translation is going to cost (down to the penny) before the project starts. Also, per-word billing favors more experienced and more specialized translators who are thus faster at their work, and encourages translators to incorporate productivity-enhancing technology into their work flow. On the minus side, per-word billing makes translation seem like commoditized piecework: we’re not selling a solution, we’re selling a bucket of words. Clients may argue (down to the penny) about unnecessary words, discounted words, and so on. Per-word billing also discourages translators from doing thorough and time-consuming research, because if we’re not typing, we’re not earning.
  • Charging by the hour seems to be gaining steam in the industry. Translators have historically charged by the hour for tasks like editing and proofreading, but now there’s a lot of talk about charging by the hour for translation too. During her preconference seminar at ATA, respected freelance translator Chris Durban noted that most direct clients are accustomed to paying for professional services (lawyers, accountants, marketing consultants, web designers) by the hour. Billing by the hour favors translators who work slowly because they are very thorough, and allows time for reading background material or doing in-depth research. But billing by the hour has its downsides: for whatever reason, most translation agencies seem to be resistant to paying an outright hourly rate that corresponds to what translators make when they bill by the word. For example, a translator earning 15 cents per word and producing 500 finished words per hour is effectively earning $75 per hour, well beyond the hourly rate that most translators report earning for tasks such as editing or proofreading. Billing by the hour also introduces the question of what is billable…phone time? e-mail time? FedEx time? revisions? And unless you have a very good handle on your translation speed for every document, or your clients will agree to start the project without a binding quote, it can be hard to know exactly how to estimate a given job.
  • Then we’ve got the third way: billing by the project. Billing by the project with no breakdown of words or hours isn’t out of the question (it’s what I do with the majority of my direct clients). This method has the advantage of allowing the translator to tweak the per-word or per-hour rate without a lot of fanfare. It also gives the client one number to focus on: no worry about words, hours, is this translator fast or slow compared to other people, etc. The obvious disadvantage is that the translator is locked in to the fixed bid; there’s no wiggle room if the project takes twice as long as expected.

Now, over to you!


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

Two cents, or $10,000?

If you’re a freelancer, you probably conduct price negotiations with clients or potential clients almost every day of your professional life. For translators, especially translators who work with agencies, these negotiations often come down to a difference of one or two cents. Your minimum rate is 15 cents per word and the client will only pay 14, or 13.5, and so on.

Price negotiation is a difficult part of freelancing. The fact that translation is normally priced in such small increments (words or lines) makes it even more difficult; kind of the opposite of negotiating the price of a house. For example when we moved from Boston to Colorado a number of years ago, my husband and I sold our house for about $300,000. When we were negotiating the sale price, we had to remind ourselves that these seemingly huge amounts of money ($6,000 to have the siding replaced! $500 to have a hauling company come take away old furniture!) represented only a tiny fraction of the house’s sale price. Translation works the other way around: we’re talking cents here, not thousands of dollars, so declining a project because the client won’t pay one more cent per word can leave a translator feeling like kind of a petty miser.

But here’s the thing: say that most full-time freelancers translate 400,000 or 500,000 words per year.  Let’s say 500,000 because I’m not that great at math and it’s easy to multiply by five. That seemingly petty one cent per word? If you extrapolate that over 500,000 words per year, it’s actually $5,000. Two cents? How about $10,000?

Forcing yourself to think about prices by the project rather than by the word can help you avoid caving in to the “it’s just one cent” mentality. Instead of negotiating the per-word price, how about calculating how much money you’re giving up per project, or per year? Rather than seeing your negotiations as “just a cent,” you’ll have a more realistic idea of the effect on your total income.