| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4 5] | Hourly rates like any other industry service Thread poster: Maria-da-Fé Albuquerque
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Samuel Murray 
Netherlands
Local time: 11:10
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
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| Rates are relatively fixed, though | Apr 30, 2023 |
Ice Scream wrote:
If you’re very productive and do a lot of words per hour, you simply charge more per hour.
This might work for translators with direct clients or particularly non-regular clients, but agencies tend to want to know what "your rates" are in advance, and they brook little deviation. Paradoxically, agencies might be willing to negotiate on the total project cost, but they are allergic to changed per-unit rates. So if your hourly rate is e.g. $50 and a job comes in that you can do in two hours instead of four, non-new clients won't accept it if you temporarily raise your rate to $100 per hour.
Frank van Overveld wrote:
You get faster as you become better.
Yes, the advantage of a per-word rate is that you can keep your rate the same or even lower it, while making more money than previously. With an hourly rate (using calendar hours), the only way for you to earn more money is to raise your rate.
[Edited at 2023-04-30 19:32 GMT]
| | | | Daryo
United Kingdom
Local time: 10:10
Serbian to English
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| Inversely ... | Apr 30, 2023 |
Stepan Konev wrote:
Recently a client of mine asked me to measure the time I spent to translate their 1500-word job. With an average translation rate of 250 words per hour, it would take 6 hours for me to complete the job. To my surprise I completed it in 2 hours.
If I really count hours not based on words or characters, then I have to bill 2 hours instead of 6. Hourly rate encourages translators to work slowly.
You could also argue that per word rates encourage translators to not bother with a tricky term, and simply use the first vaguely (im)plausible translation for it, never mind if the tricky term is key to the meaning of the whole text.
[Edited at 2023-04-30 22:25 GMT]
| | | | Daryo
United Kingdom
Local time: 10:10
Serbian to English
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Lieven Malaise wrote: Maria-da-Fé Albuquerque wrote:
Sorry, I also disagree here. A repetition, when paid (when there is a rate to consider, that is what we are talking about), does cost the translator some time, of course. If not, then the translator is not doing his/her job. A repetition is a word that the translator has to review, read, evaluate and sometimes correct/change. If there are 10.000 repetitions, there are 10.000 words to review. 10.000 words do cost some time to review, even more so if there are corrections to be made to those repetitions. Do you use a CAT tool ? A repetition is automatically generated. If you translate 'X' by 'Z', and 'X' occurs multiple times in your document, all the 'Z's' will be automatically populated. The only line you should review is the first occurrence of 'X'. Of course, if you make a mistake there, that same mistake will appear in all occurrences. But any translator which is any good won't let that happen. It would be like editing a text and missing a translation error: unprofessional.
"If you translate 'X' by 'Z', and 'X' occurs multiple times in your document, all the 'Z's' will be automatically populated."
You must be really lucky to never get a text where the same word happens to be used in different meanings within the same text! Or maybe you trust a dumb algorithm (probably coded by s.o. who never translated a single sentence) to figure it out for you?
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Samuel Murray wrote:
This might work for translators with direct clients or particularly non-regular clients, but agencies tend to want to know what "your rates" are in advance, and they brook little deviation. Paradoxically, agencies might be willing to negotiate on the total project cost, but they are allergic to changed per-unit rates. So if your hourly rate is e.g. $50 and a job comes in that you can do in two hours instead of four, non-new clients won't accept it if you temporarily raise your rate to $100 per hour.
But why would you ever vary your hourly rate???
If billing per word offered more profit for the translator, agencies would surely be less keen on it?
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| They're buying my product, not my time | May 2, 2023 |
Ice Scream wrote:
The last few objections to hourly rates make no sense to me.
If you’re very productive and do a lot of words per hour, you simply charge more per hour.
If you dishonestly charge more hours than you took, eventually you will be found out and lose your clients.
As I’ve said loads of times before, your client is buying your time, nothing else. A word rate is just an approximation of an hourly rate which some clients find useful.
My clients do not buy my time, they buy my product. How much time I take to do that is none of their business. As Kay said earlier, the longer I work in a specialization, the faster I get. There is a limit to how much I could raise my hourly rates, though, before I am no longer competitive.
As an example:
If I translate 2000 words in an 8-hour day and charge €50 / hour, then I make €400 that day.
As I progressively improve and get faster (I need to look up fewer terms, for example), then I might translate those 2000 words in 6 hours. Now I either have to find more work to make the same amount of money, or I have to charge €66.67 / hour. Maybe the client will still agree to that.
But 5 years down the road, I'm translating those 2000 words in 3 hours, and most clients aren't going to want to pay €133 / hour - and that's not even making any adjustments for inflation.
However, if I charge by word/line/page, then I'm still making the same amount as I was at the outset but in far less time. I could even increase prices some to make up for inflation without risking the clients running off. And when I'm done with those 2000 words, I can decide whether I want to use the remaining 5 hours to do more work, go on a hike, or read a good book.
| | | | Tony Keily
Local time: 11:10
Italian to English
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| Worth my while? | May 3, 2023 |
I agree with Ice Cream.
When things get too complicated and PMs start sending me charts and tables for matches and fuzzy things, I just ask them for a price. Then I have a look at the job, estimate how how long it'll take me and decide if it's worth my while. And 'worth my while' of course means what it says.
There are other less tangible factors like how much I like the agency/PM, what I have on workwise for the week, or whether the job for some reason appeals to me. B... See more I agree with Ice Cream.
When things get too complicated and PMs start sending me charts and tables for matches and fuzzy things, I just ask them for a price. Then I have a look at the job, estimate how how long it'll take me and decide if it's worth my while. And 'worth my while' of course means what it says.
There are other less tangible factors like how much I like the agency/PM, what I have on workwise for the week, or whether the job for some reason appeals to me. But it's always basically an hourly rate question.
Is Ice Cream male or female in the UK? ▲ Collapse
| | | | Daryo
United Kingdom
Local time: 10:10
Serbian to English
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| There is a fundamental flaw in that approach | May 5, 2023 |
Marina Taffetani wrote:
At the beginning of my career, I was against hourly rates because I thought the agencies/clients would dictate how many hours each job should take. After a while, a client came up who wanted me to track how many hours each job took, and would then pay me by the hour. My eyes opened and I saw this should be (IMHO) the only way translators should be paid. After a while, though, the client decided my colleagues and I were tracking too much time and started suggesting we should spend X hours on each task. To be honest, it was never more than a suggestion, but I still felt a little constrained.
To sum it up, yes, I think we should charge hourly rates and track the time spent on each job. Sadly, not many clients agree.
Leaving aside the thorny question of what should be the "right" hourly rate, there are two negative sides to it:
- someone capable of doing an equally good translation quicker than someone else would be "rewarded" by getting paid less!
- when you translate 2 apparently "same texts", if one turns out to be exceptionally easy, the client would be very happy to pay only half or third of what would be expected as "the average price" related to just the volume of the text. But if the second text turns out to be full of tricky terms that require hours of research, I'm not so sure the client will rush to pay 3 or 4 times more than for the first text.
Having said that, per word / line / page rates are not much better, if they are always the same.
No one seems to ever take into account the "complexity" of the text to translate, and you get the ridiculous expectations from agencies to pay the same for some more or less informal chit-chat and for very specialised texts.
One way or another I never bothered with rates per hour or per page as valid "indicators" of anything. I always made calculations in terms of weekly / monthly / yearly income.
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Rita Translator wrote:
My clients do not buy my time, they buy my product. How much time I take to do that is none of their business.
I think we’re talking at cross-purposes. You have nothing to sell but your time. Same as any profession on Earth. If you’re more productive during that time they will be happy to pay more for that time. It’s all an approximation of the same thing, absolutely, but your time is what they are effectively buying.
The selling-a-product/solution argument is solely for the snake-oil über-translators of the conference circuit.
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Daryo
United Kingdom
Local time: 10:10
Serbian to English
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Ice Scream wrote: Rita Translator wrote:
My clients do not buy my time, they buy my product. How much time I take to do that is none of their business.
I think we’re talking at cross-purposes. You have nothing to sell but your time. Same as any profession on Earth. If you’re more productive during that time they will be happy to pay more for that time. It’s all an approximation of the same thing, absolutely, but your time is what they are effectively buying. The selling-a-product/solution argument is solely for the snake-oil über-translators of the conference circuit.
The only thing clients are interested in is the end result. What else would you care about if you happened to be the one needing a translation?
How much clients are willing to pay depends only on who is available and what level of quality do they need and how quickly they need it. How much time it will take the translator to do it is derived from that and is the translator's worry.
I was under the impression until now that translators sell knowledge, not time.
Apparently there is some new category of translators that only need to have "free time"??
[Edited at 2023-05-07 19:21 GMT]
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