I think that in instances like you describe, one should ask for a retainer from the customer:

“Dear customer,

we have found a translator who was kind enough to agree to stay up late until you send in your letter, then translate it and send it back to you; if you wish to retain her services, please sign and return us the attached retainer agreement, which stipulates you’ll pay $ X (in addition to the rate for the actual translation of the letter).

Best regards, “

your advises regarding how to produce a good job are all very interesting. As an addition, I would like to know how you feel in the following situation (which arose yesterday evening).

A client calls my agency at 19:00 and asks for the translation of a Spanish letter to French during the night for some good reasons. No one else being at the office, I find a ES-FR translator who is kind to accept the job. Then the customer asks me to do the same for the answer they are writing to this letter (without having received yet the French translation of the original letter). I find another translator who kindly accepts to receive their text directly from them between 20:00 and 21:00. I write precise instructions to the PM who will undertake the project the day after.

Then, after a good night, I come back to the office. The client did not send nothing during the night to the Spanish translator, did not notice her (who waited until 23:00), and answered to our queries: “Well, we will send it to you when we are finished, and we need it translated by 17:00 at the latest”. It is noon now and they did send nothing. Either we will receive something and have to work in a rush again, or we will receive nothing.

I sent an apologize e-mail to the Spanish translator, but if she refuses to work in a rush for us in the future, I will understand her.

That’s it. Just to give the agency point of view of a ***rush client.

Best regards,

Guillaume de Brébisson
Agence de traduction Anyword

very useful post. I had started to answer in a comment but my answer grew so much I thought it best to post it in About Translation (of course, with reference to your original post).

I always say no and explain that that is an unreasonable amount of work and the quality will suffer. Then they grovel. Then I negotiate like crazy to get the best possible price for the largest amount I can comfortably and confidently finish in the time limit. For me this varies drastically depending on the subject matter and how complicated *that text* will be for *me* to translate in those 12 hours.

And then I tell the client that if I finish early and they still haven’t placed everything, I’d be happy to take more as time allows. This system works well for everyone because they often haven’t found a single other person to take any of it by the time I get back to them 5 hours later with my first chunk completed. Then I often agree to take more.

The downside is that a day like that really fries my brain and the agency/client has to do the proofreading and ask me if they encounter anything they need to speak the source language to fix. The upside is that they get all or most of their document translated and I can make several weeks’ worth of income in a day and often the subject matter for jobs like that ends up being something I’m very comfortable with (otherwise I really would be adamant in saying no). Good thing that only happens once a year!