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Question about a rate offered
Thread poster: Adam, MA Trans
Bernhard Sulzer
Bernhard Sulzer  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 06:51
English to German
+ ...
Unreasonable and unprofessional behavior Feb 5, 2017

Adam-MSCR wrote:

Hello everybody,

Long time without posting. I have been busy translating for a charity to gain experience. I hope everybody is well and happy.

I recently started messaging agencies to offer my services as a translator. I just received a reply from one saying that my language pairs are very crowded (French, Italian and Spanish) and that the fee they offer to all translators is €0.05 per source word - which is non-negotiable.

Personally, it takes me about 4 hours to translate 1000 words because I like to do background reading on the text, maybe take time to confirm a translation term with someone if I'm not 100% sure etc. In my opinion it takes me 4 hours to produce a high-quality translation.

By that token, I'd be paid €12.50 per hour. Can anyone confirm if that rate is as derisory as I think and hope it is compared with what other agencies pay? I'm disappointed because it's been my dream to translate for many many years. In addition, as you will all know, language learning takes a lot of time and dedication.

Do all agencies pay this "take it or leave it" rate? I would really appreciate any advice on this as I'm feeling completely lost and disappointed.


Hi Adam,

In my book, this "take-it-or-leave-it" rate falls under the category of unreasonable demands and any professional translator should stay away from people/agencies like that.

You might be interested in my thread about unreasonable demands from outsourcers:
http://www.proz.com/forum/money_matters/310400-can_we_please_do_away_with_unreasonable_requests_from_outsourcers.html


 
Andrea Halbritter
Andrea Halbritter  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 11:51
French to German
+ ...
Much too low Feb 5, 2017

This rate is not only derisory, it's insulting I'd say.

 
MK2010
MK2010  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 06:51
French to English
+ ...
You'll figure it out as you go Feb 6, 2017

Same with any job. You learn in the field. 250 words an hour is SLOW. Sorry, but true. Don't expect clients to pay more just because you're slow-- regardless of what the rate is. A lot of us here can translate 800-1,000 words an hour.

Now: that hinges on lots of things: your actual level of fluency, difficulty of material, specialization, etc. You will learn that as you go along. What kind of material can I translate quickly? What kind of material is going to involve me looking up e
... See more
Same with any job. You learn in the field. 250 words an hour is SLOW. Sorry, but true. Don't expect clients to pay more just because you're slow-- regardless of what the rate is. A lot of us here can translate 800-1,000 words an hour.

Now: that hinges on lots of things: your actual level of fluency, difficulty of material, specialization, etc. You will learn that as you go along. What kind of material can I translate quickly? What kind of material is going to involve me looking up every other word?

Those things you learn while doing. If you're just starting out, take any job. Seriously. What the hell. LEARN. Build your CV. Find out what your strengths are as a translator. Find out what you are and are not willing to do. There's a learning curve with any job, but it ALL builds experience.

One of my first gigs: translating a manual for a company that manufactures **ball bearings**. Took me forever. Had me in tears. Paid crap. Made me realize, I do NOT want to do this kind of work. Flash forward a few years: I now primarily work in fields I really enjoy, and which, because of my background and level of fluency, I can do quickly (not always, but most often). If you can work quickly, you can finish your day while others are still looking up words and sweating tears of frustration over their keyboards. It also means you can accept jobs you really, really want that pay less and yet still enable you to make a good living.

Live and learn. Literally. Is there really any other way?

P.S.:I should add this, because a lot of translators specialize in technical fields, which tend to pay more than non-technical fields: I could have done MORE ball-bearing jobs, learned how to do better research on them, build my own little glossary of terms, blablabla, and then, boom, a few years later, become somewhat of an expert in the field, moved on from low-paying clients to higher paying clients, and arrive at the point where I can now do in two hours a job which, my first time around, took me two days. So that is also how these things work.


[Edited at 2017-02-06 04:49 GMT]
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Merab Dekano
Merab Dekano  Identity Verified
Spain
Member (2014)
English to Spanish
+ ...
800-1,000 words Feb 6, 2017

MK2010 wrote:

A lot of us here can translate 800-1,000 words an hour.



If you only accept work within your field of expertise (recommended), you can probably stretch it to 500-600 words an hour, but 800-1000 is pushing the envelope way too hard. After all, you need to proofread your work at least twice (in CAT environment first and then once the file has been exported). Or you deliver unfinished product?

In my experience, 300 words/hour is minimum and more than 600 just doesn’t happen in practice. Again, this is true if you only accept work from your field of expertise. Otherwise, some texts can have you working till cows come home.


 
gayd (X)
gayd (X)
very sound piece of advice Feb 6, 2017

MK2010 wrote:

Same with any job. You learn in the field. 250 words an hour is SLOW. Sorry, but true. Don't expect clients to pay more just because you're slow-- regardless of what the rate is. A lot of us here can translate 800-1,000 words an hour.

Now: that hinges on lots of things: your actual level of fluency, difficulty of material, specialization, etc. You will learn that as you go along. What kind of material can I translate quickly? What kind of material is going to involve me looking up every other word?

Those things you learn while doing. If you're just starting out, take any job. Seriously. What the hell. LEARN. Build your CV. Find out what your strengths are as a translator. Find out what you are and are not willing to do. There's a learning curve with any job, but it ALL builds experience.

One of my first gigs: translating a manual for a company that manufactures **ball bearings**. Took me forever. Had me in tears. Paid crap. Made me realize, I do NOT want to do this kind of work. Flash forward a few years: I now primarily work in fields I really enjoy, and which, because of my background and level of fluency, I can do quickly (not always, but most often). If you can work quickly, you can finish your day while others are still looking up words and sweating tears of frustration over their keyboards. It also means you can accept jobs you really, really want that pay less and yet still enable you to make a good living.

Live and learn. Literally. Is there really any other way?

P.S.:I should add this, because a lot of translators specialize in technical fields, which tend to pay more than non-technical fields: I could have done MORE ball-bearing jobs, learned how to do better research on them, build my own little glossary of terms, blablabla, and then, boom, a few years later, become somewhat of an expert in the field, moved on from low-paying clients to higher paying clients, and arrive at the point where I can now do in two hours a job which, my first time around, took me two days. So that is also how these things work.


[Edited at 2017-02-06 04:49 GMT]


have a look at this thread
http://www.proz.com/forum/money_matters/297887-agencies_lowering_my_rates_over_the_years.html


 
Mirko Mainardi
Mirko Mainardi  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 11:51
Member
English to Italian
Live and learn Feb 6, 2017

MK2010 wrote:

Same with any job. You learn in the field. 250 words an hour is SLOW. Sorry, but true. Don't expect clients to pay more just because you're slow-- regardless of what the rate is. A lot of us here can translate 800-1,000 words an hour.


I don't presume to teach anything to anyone, but, in my experience, that range is unrealistic for "most of us". Maybe OK for editing/proofreading, not for translation. Even most agencies I work with tend to use 2.5k per day as the standard metric to define project deadlines.

Besides, the implication here seems to be that €0.05 per word could be fine, as long as you translate faster, and I really don't think that's the right way to look at it...

I remember reading several threads about this over the years, and the figures are quite different from those you mention (with the odd exception). Besides, in one of those, from March 2016, you yourself wrote "Now that's just crazy. As for your 8-10K / day, that's pretty impressive. I think around 6K has been my max so far". If 6k is your maximum speed per working day (8 hours?), then it should reasonably be less than 750 words per hour...

There also are many polls about translation speed here on ProZ.
This poll had 2,000 respondents, and 77% of them said they could translate up to 3,000 words per day: http://www.proz.com/polls/11032?action=results&poll_ident=11032&sp=polls
These basically say the same thing:
http://www.proz.com/polls/12800?action=results&poll_ident=12800&sp=polls
http://www.proz.com/polls/10076?action=results&poll_ident=10076&sp=polls
http://www.proz.com/polls/1946?action=results&poll_ident=1946&sp=polls
http://www.proz.com/polls/9926?action=results&poll_ident=9926&sp=polls


 
Lingua 5B
Lingua 5B  Identity Verified
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Local time: 11:51
Member (2009)
English to Croatian
+ ...
Intellectual/creative work... Feb 6, 2017

can't be measured in hours as it goes far beyond the time.

IMO, it's better to charge per word rather than estimate how much you can translate in an hour, as it's not manual or mechanical work (or perhaps it is for some, just replacing one word with another while thinking about something else). I can do the dishes like that, for instance doing a big pile of dishes for 30 minutes while being mentally immersed into something else all the time. Then I can easily charge by the hour.
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can't be measured in hours as it goes far beyond the time.

IMO, it's better to charge per word rather than estimate how much you can translate in an hour, as it's not manual or mechanical work (or perhaps it is for some, just replacing one word with another while thinking about something else). I can do the dishes like that, for instance doing a big pile of dishes for 30 minutes while being mentally immersed into something else all the time. Then I can easily charge by the hour.

And I would suggest to the OP not to fall for tricks and tactics agencies use (why would it matter to you how much others charge?), or also they often say "we will find someone else" and other intimidation techniques. Just don't fall for it, whether you are a beginner or not, it has nothing to do with being a beginner.

[Edited at 2017-02-06 09:47 GMT]
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Christine Andersen
Christine Andersen  Identity Verified
Denmark
Local time: 11:51
Member (2003)
Danish to English
+ ...
Get a CAT Feb 6, 2017

Get a CAT if you don't already use one, and take advantage of it where you can. But don't worry too much about how many words you can translate an hour.

The Danes have an expression 'selling elastic by the yard', and that is precisely what word counts often are in translation.

If you get the same text, you will find that the number of words varies considerably from language to language. I work with Scandinavian languages as source languages, and on average you get more
... See more
Get a CAT if you don't already use one, and take advantage of it where you can. But don't worry too much about how many words you can translate an hour.

The Danes have an expression 'selling elastic by the yard', and that is precisely what word counts often are in translation.

If you get the same text, you will find that the number of words varies considerably from language to language. I work with Scandinavian languages as source languages, and on average you get more words in most target languages, so that is my argument, when people complain that Scandinavian languages are 'expensive'. BTW I don't accept jobs below € 0.11 0r preferably € 0.12 per source word. That ends up as something like € 0.10 per English target word.

I believe the ratio goes the other way with Spanish and French to English.

I do use a CAT, but there may be anything from NO repeats or fuzzy matches AT ALL to very high percentages, depending on the type of text and how long I have been working for the client to accumulate their special terminology and factors like that. On the other hand, having the terminology at hand, storing strings like 'The Danish Act on Personal Data Protection' and so on... which will speed you up a little.
___________________________

How many words you can translate in an hour or a day also varies enormously, depending on the type of text. For legal or medical work I find it very heavy going to translate 2000 'new' words a day for more than a couple of days. With research and background reading, progress may be slow, even in a subject area you are reasonably familiar with.

There are different ways of counting words - how many words there are on a standard page of 2400 keystrokes vary enormously too. I have had them with averages of 6.7 strokes per word and with averages of 5.5 - which makes an enormous difference! (The spaces were counted in both cases.) Due to the structure of the languages, there are lots of really long words in some technical or legal texts than in more 'general' texts.

It really is a large percentage. It is typically academics who tell me their these will be XX standard pages, and I reckon a page of academic text will be roughly 250 words. Then I can look into the subject area and the kind of terminology. The fewer words on a 'standard page' like that the more DIFFICULT the text will be... :-roll:
You risk getting paid less per page for more difficult texts, precisely the ones that take an hour for 200 words, if you accept the supposedly objective counts in terms of lines or pages!

__________________________

If there are white lies, black lies and statistics, then in translation there are source word counts, target word counts, CAT word counts and totally manipulated fuzzy counts where nobody has the faintest idea what anyone else means.

Word counts are not entirely useless, but you need to know what precisely you are counting - apples, pears, grapes, grains of rice... I dislike selling translation by the kilo like groceries.

Check your text and try to set your rate accordingly. Nobody argues when half a kilo of coffee is quite a lot more expensive than half a kilo of flour. A thousand words is not just some indeterminate mass - it depends on the text!

The short answer is that you have to set your own rates.
You can check averages for different languages and subject areas here:

http://search.proz.com/?sp=pfe/rates

-- but remember, these are averages, and you should probably avoid going below them!
The rates calculator may be useful too:
http://www.proz.com/translator-rates-calculator/

Check for more under the Tools tab at the top right of the Proz.com homepage.

Best of luck!
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MK2010
MK2010  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 06:51
French to English
+ ...
Well maybe I don't work 8 hours a day :) Feb 7, 2017

Mirko Mainardi wrote:
Besides, in one of those, from March 2016, you yourself wrote "Now that's just crazy. As for your 8-10K / day, that's pretty impressive. I think around 6K has been my max so far". If 6k is your maximum speed per working day (8 hours?), then it should reasonably be less than 750 words per hour...


If you work quickly, you don't need to work 8 hours a day. Anyway, all I'm saying is, you figure this stuff out as you go along. Yes, there's one text you can do with your eyes closed at supersonic speed with one hand tied behind your back, and there's another that has ONE word that trips you up for 20 minutes. But honestly, someone who, in most cases, can only translate 250 words per hour, is going to need to charge a lot more to survive. Just like people who live in expensive countries need to charge more to pay the rent, either that or work 14-hour days. Blablabla. It's all a balancing act.

Ultimately, to me at least, it's about, how much can you make in a day with what you consider a reasonable amount of effort? Are you working in fields that are too difficult for you and require too much effort for it to make it worth your while (we've ALL been there)? Are you working too slow? Are you charging too little?

Again, this all comes with the field. For me, to be honest, time management is the big issue. I'm still working on that. In many of my jobs, I could probably be literally done with my work day by NOON if I got up early AND didn't get distracted. But having a job that depends a lot on the internet can be tricky, because maybe you're looking up a specific term, which, for some reason, then leads you to wonder about how many people get killed by sharks every year, and before you know it, you're deep into "man-eaters" and gasping at the panther in India who ate 400 people one hundred years ago. Unfortunately, you can't charge your clients for that, though.


 
Mair A-W (PhD)
Mair A-W (PhD)
Germany
Local time: 11:51
German to English
+ ...
(getting off-topic) Feb 7, 2017

MK2010 wrote:
But having a job that depends a lot on the internet can be tricky, because maybe you're looking up a specific term, which, for some reason, then leads you to wonder about how many people get killed by sharks every year, and before you know it, you're deep into "man-eaters" and gasping at the panther in India who ate 400 people one hundred years ago. Unfortunately, you can't charge your clients for that, though.


I love this and would like to save it to my quotes file.


 
Adam, MA Trans
Adam, MA Trans
United Kingdom
Local time: 10:51
French to English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Distractions Feb 7, 2017

But having a job that depends a lot on the internet can be tricky, because maybe you're looking up a specific term, which, for some reason, then leads you to wonder about how many people get killed by sharks every year, and before you know it, you're deep into "man-eaters" and gasping at the panther in India who ate 400 people one hundred years ago. Unfortunately, you can't charge your clients for that, though.
[/quote]

This is one reason why it takes me 4 hours!


 
Adam, MA Trans
Adam, MA Trans
United Kingdom
Local time: 10:51
French to English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Thanks for your replies Feb 7, 2017

Hello everybody,

I have enjoyed reading all of your replies. Some people have said the figure I quoted is very low for an agency based in Western Europe, others have picked up on my translation speed of 4 hours for 1000 words.

I probably should write that normally the texts are bite sized, about 250 words as a total. By the time I have had a coffee, downloaded the file, had a read through of the text, translated it and then proofread it a couple of times, it normally is
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Hello everybody,

I have enjoyed reading all of your replies. Some people have said the figure I quoted is very low for an agency based in Western Europe, others have picked up on my translation speed of 4 hours for 1000 words.

I probably should write that normally the texts are bite sized, about 250 words as a total. By the time I have had a coffee, downloaded the file, had a read through of the text, translated it and then proofread it a couple of times, it normally is an hour. That said, if the text was 1000 words, I imagine it wouldn't take an additional 3 hours due to, I would imagine, a consistency in writing style, thematics and vocabulary used. I often find if I'm translating something different to what I'm used to it is harder at first due to unknown vocabulary (which I don't even know in English) but then it gets much easier as I become more familiar. One example was a text on hiking books. There were words I had to learn in both source and target languages. Another was a translation on topographical map reading which I had no knowledge of at all. As a result, my translation time also consisted of watching a Youtube video to learn about topographical map reading, before actually starting the translation....so I should have been a bit clearer when I quoted 4 hours for 1000 words..... that video was about 10 minutes long!

Another interesting example was a football (soccer) trick used in play. If you think about more well-known ones like "the nutmeg", "the sombrero" and "the Cruyff turn" - these are all fairly popular and documented. There was a very vague one in a translation which took a long time for me to find in English. Again, Youtube was a big help for that!
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MK2010
MK2010  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 06:51
French to English
+ ...
Permission granted :) Feb 7, 2017

mairaw wrote:

MK2010 wrote:
But having a job that depends a lot on the internet can be tricky, because maybe you're looking up a specific term, which, for some reason, then leads you to wonder about how many people get killed by sharks every year, and before you know it, you're deep into "man-eaters" and gasping at the panther in India who ate 400 people one hundred years ago. Unfortunately, you can't charge your clients for that, though.


I love this and would like to save it to my quotes file.


Actually, a "quote file" is a great idea-- mine takes the form of hundreds of 2-line emails sent to myself.

Back on topic:

@ Adam: you're right about the research part and that's one of the things you get better at as you go along, which makes you more productive. Sometimes the end client already has material online (a website, press releases and such) where you can already find translations of a lot of the terms you're looking for. That may sound really obvious, but personally, I didn't figure that out right away and it cost me a lot of time.


 
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