Beginning freelance translators often want to know (understandably) how much they can expect to earn in our industry. Experienced freelance translators often want to know (understandably) whether they are earning enough for the effort they put into their businesses. So, what do freelance translators earn?
- The American Translators Association does a compensation survey every few years: you can purchase the entire report here or read the executive summary for free. The dates here are a little confusing: the data tables in the summary say that they are from 2006, the file itself is named 2007 and the executive summary appeared in the ATA Chronicle in February 2008. According to this survey, the average full-time freelancer makes a little over $60,000; but US-based respondents reported a large income disparity according to whether or not they are ATA-certified (average income of $72,000 for certified translators and $53,000 for non-certified).
- The US Bureau of Labor Statistics has some information too, and it’s even more disparate. The BLS reports that in May 2008, the average salary for translators and interpreters was about $38,000 (yikes), with the highest 10 percent earning over $69,000 and the average federal government language specialist earning an average of $79,000.
- PayScale.com has some snapshot info about translators and interpreters, and it’s also broken down by years of experience.
I think that the issue with most of these surveys is that they are not specific enough to individual situations. For example, is someone who works 35 hours a week and takes 6 weeks of vacation full time or part time? Is someone who works at a client’s office 2 days a week and works for freelance clients 3 days a week self-employed or in-house? Should translation volume be taken into account? If you earned $130,000 last year but you worked 70 hours a week with no vacation, should your income be pro rated to a 40 hour work week with 4 weeks off? You get the picture!
Anecdotally, I think that most of the above-referenced surveys are slanted toward the low end of the market. Back in 2008, I wrote a blog post on Secrets of Six-Figure Translators, and since then I’ve talked to many more freelancers who’ve either stated or conveyed that they earn over $100,000 a year. I think that if you’re very good at what you do and you market yourself fairly assertively, there is enough work out there to earn at least $75,000 a year as a freelance translator even if you work with a mix of agencies and direct clients. I’d say that at this point, all of the translators I know who work exclusively with direct clients earn at least $100,000 a year.
But the real question when it comes to income is: is it enough? The “is it enough” question involves a lot of subjective factors, because it ties into the subsidiary question of whether you’d be doing better if you had a different job. Here’s where the subjectivity comes in. For example in my case:
- I’m reasonably happy with my income as compared to how much I work. I earn more than the ATA average and my sense is that I work less (maybe even a lot less) than most freelancers do, partly because of my family and non-work commitments and partly because I think I’m more productive at 30ish hours per week. However when I look at how the benefits of my husband’s in-house job (company-funded retirement plan, insurance, paid vacation, and so on) add up, it’s a reality check. If I deduct 15.3% self-employment tax (which I only pay on about half my income since I have an S-Corp), 4-6 weeks unpaid vacation and my self-funded retirement plan from what I make, the bottom line is decidedly different.
- But, then there are the subjective factors. I love where we live, and there are very, very few in-house jobs in our area for what I do. The only reasonable option, working for a government agency, would involve driving over an hour each way and a relatively inflexible schedule. It’s very important to me to have a work schedule that meshes with my daughter’s school schedule at least until she is old enough to be home alone. Realistically, if I wanted an in-house job that was close to my house and that would offer a similar level of flexibility to freelancing, I would probably be looking at earning less than half what I make now.
“Enough” also depends on where and how you live. $75,000 sounds like a decent chunk of money, but if you are not incorporated and thus pay self-employment tax on that entire amount, live in a nice apartment in a major city, have a car loan or student loan or credit card payment and fund your own health insurance and retirement, that amount goes pretty quickly. On the other hand if you live in a fairly rural area, are debt-free or close to it and practice freelance frugality, you could probably be saving 50% of your after-tax income if you gross $75,000 or more.
Readers, over to you…thoughts on the income issue?
Corinne,
Very thought-provoking post!
When I moved to France, I discovered that the career prospects for an American with a liberal arts education were not great. I did not want to go back to school to earn a qualification that would have more clout on the French job market, so starting my own business seemed like the only option (I had nothing to lose). That business could have been anything, really, but in the meantime I had discovered and fallen in love with translation, so it ended up being translation!
Ten years later we are now a three-person company (two translators and a business development and project manager) and all three of us are able to earn (in terms of take-home pay) what a middle manager in a big corporation would earn in France (and in some cases more, given that women tend to earn less in the corporate world, but not in our all-female company where women rule…go girls!).
A lot of people thought we were crazy to bring in a third “non producer” into the business. But what’s the use of making six figures if you are working all the time? Having someone to put out fires, handle interruptions (requests for quotes, other queries) takes the pressure off the translators and lets us get our production work done more efficiently. Totally worth it.
Is what we earn enough? Well, more would be better of course, but yes. It is definitely enough when you factor in the lifestyle benefits. I get to spread my workday out however I want and spend three hours a day outside with my two rescue Border Collies. I can also take a day off whenever I want and plan my vacations around school holidays (no kids) to get the best deals. Also, no commute, far less spending on clothing and other incidentals since I work at home (hello polar fleece and jeans, goodbye nylons and dry cleaning).
Right now “growing” our business does not mean increasing our revenue. We are working on making our business stronger, not bigger, and making sure it could keep operating smoothly if one of the three of us were ill, for example. I guess you could say we are chasing long-term stability rather than a bigger paycheck.
> … is someone who works 35 hours a week and
> takes 6 weeks of vacation full time or part time?
Sounds like normal full-time employment in many European countries
The “enough” question seems a silly one to me. Comparisons are all very nice, but mostly irrelevant. I think a better way to ask the question is whether one’s present income meets the needs it is intended to, what potential there is for increasing this income and whether the result may be worth the effort to achieve the increase.
One translator I know was very unhappy with a substantial six-figure income, because it failed to cover her various habits. Others I see live well with families on far less than I typically bring in when I feel like playing workhorse.
I care very little for official statistics; aside from their lack of relevance to many individual situations, I don’t believe them any more than I believe official inflation figures. We need to stop worrying about the comparisons and what others think we should be doing and when and how and make a careful, sober analysis of our own individual situations.
Corinne, I think the “certified” versus “non-certified” figures are interesting as general points of reference. I see some similarities in Germany from my own experience. Raising prices substantially became much easier once I could write my silly, legally protected title as a state-examined and certified, court-sworn translator in the signature block under a quotation. I find that amusing, because I know a good number of better translators without these qualifications, but that’s life. That’s also a direction someone needing or wanting more could go.
I am wondering whether the “certified” versus “non-certified” differentiation in the ATA income surveys means anything at all in the real world.
Since only agencies seem to even know about the existence of the ATA certification (in 24 years, I have never been asked by a patent lawyer anything at all about ATA), one would have to assume that most ATA-certified translators usually work for agencies. Hence, they would be by default in the group that tends to makes quite a bit less money.
So what do the ATA figures really mean? Just like Kevin Lossner, I tend to be very skeptical of official statistics (as the saying goes: “there are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics”).
I think that it is quite possible, or perhaps even likely that many if not most translators who make nice six figure incomes are not ATA certified, or not even ATA members.
On the other hand, the situation in Europe and elsewhere may be very different from US, of course.
Incidentally, I am trying to figure out how is it possible that a machine translation from Portuguese passed that ATA accreditation test.
I have never seen a machine translation that did not look like a machine translation, but maybe it’s just me ……
Your post is quite clear, but I think there are huge differences between language combinations that might explain the difference in salaries. For instance, if you work from English into Spanish, the average per word rate is considerably lower than from English into German or even Spanish into English. At the end of the day, for someone like me it means I have to translate a lot more words than a German or an American colleague to achieve a similar income, and since the amount of hours I can work a day are limited, it basically means some people just have to put up with earning less.
I couldn’t agree more!
“I think there are huge differences between language combinations that might explain the difference in salaries”.
That is true, of course. Plus if you translate a language such as Czech, the rates tend to be low and the market is really small. At least the market for Spanish or French is quite big.
On the other hand, “more profitable” languages go for some reason through slow periods every now and then. I think that the market for translations from Japanese is just now coming out of a recession, while translators of Korean and Chinese were quite busy last year.
On most years I mostly translate Japanese, but last year would have been really bad for me if I did not translate other languages as well, German in particular.
I quite agree with both your original article and Kevin Lossner’s comments.
It really depends on your lifestyle and if you are covering your needs. That said, there are always more nice things we can spend money on.
I would be interested in examining the correlation between experience and salary, especially in the UK. We do not have anything as official as Staatsexamen in translation, and translation BA degrees are generally less well thought of than language degrees, on account of the universities that offer them and their obscurity. As Kevin says, I know of some excellent non-certified translators, who earn a very comfortable living. I also know some of certified translators who are pretty terrible and, quite rightly, charge less than me. With rates, I like the philosophy of charging based on the quality you produce, not necessarily your paper qualifications. Positive client references and an ability to demonstrate your expertise are also valuable deciding factors.
That brings me onto another point, regarding low rates. Some translators may feel they do not need to charge high rates, because of where they live or something similar. Many are wary of raising their rates for fear that they will be undercut. But how many quality clients REALLY choose their translators based on cost alone? Those clients that do decide based on cost tend to be the fly-by-night agencies that soon create a negative reputation for other elements of malpractice, e.g. not paying translators on time/at all. They soon lose any clients they have after inevitable problems with quality.
The fact of the matter remains that your earnings should reflect the quality and quantity of the work that you do. If you work 40 hours a week and charge $0.04 per word, so end up with a pretty below average salary, that is a problem. Those translators that work 10 hours a week for $0.16 word are, by comparison, doing somewhat better – even if both end up with a comparable salary. Your quality and quantity are not influenced by whether you are working from the Bhandra slum of Mumbai or a Chicago penthouse. If you choose to live in a cheap or expensive property, that benefit or burden should be yours and yours alone to enjoy / bear.
I am not in a position to speak on the awareness of ATA certification outside of agencies, but I don’t think that is necessarily relevant. Marketed correctly, a certification written on toilet paper in crayon by a third grader can get you better rates with some people. I think my use of the German JVEG is a good example of that. It’s a law governing compensation for those providing services to the courts and certain public agencies. It’s very limited in scope, and there is – AFAIK – no official translation of it. My personal translation of the relevant sections is probably the most information on it available to the English-speaking world. It actually has no relevance to business with agencies or industry clients. But if one of these calls up asking for a certified translation from mew, I simply state that as a court-sworn translator I use JVEG as a guideline for the range of charges. In fact, I often do this for non-certified work when I don’t simply quote higher averages from the BDÜ surveys. The response is very often quite positive.
Once again, I personally don’t see most formal qualifications as being any indicator of competence or quality. My reasons for acquiring these qualifications about 6 years into my life as a full-time freelance translator were quirky to put it mildly, and I never believed for a moment that it would be of any importance in rates or access to interesting projects. But I was quite wrong on that score. These qualifications, together with membership in a widely recognized professional association have probably had the greatest positive impact on my professional life as a translator compared to everything else. So I would actually encourage anyone who is in this profession for the long haul to think about such things. It doesn’t mean you’ll be a better translator. But marketing to certain groups will be easier or perhaps even possible, whereas with no crummy paper it might not be.
ATA does a lot of good work and I have been a member for 24 years. It’s only 140 dollars, they list me in their database, which means that I get some additional work from agencies, and I also get to use on my own certifications of my translations the phrase “I am a member of good standing of the American Translators Association”, which is handy for this purpose.
I am just wondering whether the conclusion that ATA makes every year, namely that ATA-certified translators make more money than other translators is based on reality.
Personally, I doubt it.
I personally think that those statistics are very skewed, as they do not take into account the geographical location of the translator and their language combination. And they especially do not take into account the economic situation in the target language countries.
What I mean is that English, French, German, Japanese – these are all languages of developed, first world countries, where the cost of living is high and therefore people are used to paying a lot for anything. There are plenty of translators in these countries (USA, UK, France, Germany, etc.) who say “oh no, I will never take less than 0.08 Euro per word, it’s not worth my time” – and they are right! With rates like this, their annual income will be in 80-120K bracket, and good on them.
On the other hand, you have Eastern European, Asia, South American, etc. countries where cost of living is cheap and people baulk at paying more than 0.03 Euro per word. Translators in these countries might be earning (wildly surmising and generalising here) 30-40K, and they are HAPPY with it, because it’s still more than they get anywhere else.
The problem arises, of course, when one lives in a first world country, but works in one of the “cheap” language combinations. Take my case – I live in Australia, where Henderson’s poverty line is $47K per year *for a single person*. I translate from Russian, and the average translator’s salary in Russia is $10-20K a year. (Average national salary is something like $7K per year, so the translators are doing well. No, I am not kidding you – 7000 USD per annum). I am well paid within Australia, but there is precious little translating work here, and I have to look for projects elsewhere.
(I quoted a proofreading rate to an agency in Moscow last week – 0.03 USD per word. Not much, I hear you say. The PM wrote back in shock, saying that they pay their **translators** 0.01 USD per word, and that my rate was “insane”. So it goes).
I guess I don’t have to tell you that it’s an uphill struggle to find clients who will pay me “western rates”. And so, I don’t believe those statistics – they are just too subjective and impractical. The only thing they do is give some of us unrealistic expectations and us feel like failures for not being able to earn a decent living from this profession…
/rant
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Let’s be honest: if you’re self-employed and working a 35-hour week, you’re working part-time. Even if your target is 40 hours per week translating, you have to add at least 5 hours per week for admin, sales/marketing, training, and so on. Double that if you’re working for direct clients. And double that again if you’re running a small translation company (rather than being a solo freelance).
The ATA income findings you cite (disparity between certified and non-certified translators) are probably self-selecting, because the number of non-certified translators who respond to ATA surveys is almost inevitably going to be a considerably smaller proportion of the universe of non-certified translators (e.g., in the U.S.) than the proportion of ATA-certified respondents. I also suspect that U.S.-based translators who earn less than, say, USD 25k a year (full-time) are less likely to respond to such surveys because they themselves are perfectly aware that their income is very much on the low side (and they’re probably not ATA members, either).
That said, I think that average translator incomes in industrialized countries are probably declining, at least in real terms, and this trend is set to continue for a number of reasons. I don’t think that today’s new entrants to the profession (even those with a plain vanilla translation MA) can look forward to the same generous income levels that a surprisingly large number of FIGES translators today are able to achieve. The new generation of translators is going to have to bring a lot more to the table in terms of subject-area expertise, business skills, investment in life-long learning, and other factors, if they hope to replicate the sort of success that those of us in the older generation(s) have enjoyed over the past 15 to 20 years.
I do think that those of us who were in on the IT/Internet revolution right from the start, who hitched a ride on the tech market boom in the 1990s, and who helped shape the maturing translation market in the first decade of the 21st century to the point where significant market segments are not seriously exposed to cyclical downturns, have quite possibly been living in a golden age of translation that may not be repeated.
What I find disappointing is that there practically zero research being carried out into the *economics* of translation, a subject that appears to be of little or no interest whatsoever to translation academics (maybe translation attracts the wrong sort of academics?). I can’t think of any other job or profession that is so poorly researched in terms of the microeconomic fundamentals and interactions. The translator’s invisibility strikes again?
“I think that average translator incomes in industrialized countries are probably declining, at least in real terms, and this trend is set to continue for a number of reasons. I don’t think that today’s new entrants to the profession (even those with a plain vanilla translation MA) can look forward to the same generous income levels that a surprisingly large number of FIGES translators today are able to achieve.”
Very interesting …. but, could you explain why you think so? For example, do you think that it is just a part of a trend toward lower income levels of “knowledge workers” such as mid level managers or computer programmers, as more and more of the wealth is being transferred with taxes by politicians, who really are corporate operatives rather then representatives of voters, at least here in US, to the filthy rich, such as banksters on Wall Street?
That would be one explanation that I could agree with.
And what is FIGES? Ich habe Keine ahnung.
Steve: Kevin already explained what FIGES is. It’s not goofy, though, and has been around for decades.
I think there are a number of factors that are currently combining to put pressure on translator incomes and are likely to do so for the foreseeable future. Here are just a couple (I really don’t have the time at the moment to flesh this out in any detail):
- The growing market power and reach of increasingly large agencies. Their main aim is to make their numbers, which means reducing the share of actual translation costs. They are able to leverage informational asymmetries to their advantage, safe in the knowledge that, whatever price they’re prepared to pay for translations, somebody, somewhere will accept it.
- One result of this is that other agencies playing in the same space (medium- to low-quality translations) compete even more fiercely on price, producing a vicious downward spiral. The real price wars are being fought here, and the losers are the translators. Increasingly, customers are starting to expect extremely competitive bidding fights for the projects they have to offer, and basically they just sit back and wait for the bidders to blink.
- Consequently, translators who can actually produce reasonable, though not top, quality, are trying to move up the scale, in turn putting a certain amount of price pressure on the high end of the market: not very successfully at the moment, but that could change.
My main concern, though, is for the recent, current and future entrants to the translation profession. I fear that many of them are not going to be able to make it financially, even if they have talent to offer, unless they come with ready-made skill sets that give them an immediate advantage in the market. I think that deciding you want to translate, and then slowly building up subject-area expertise, business and marketing skills, and a network of customers is a model without a future.
After more than 20 years in the business (Flefo was great, wasn’t it?), I’m now convinced more than ever that the normal laws of economics don’t apply in much of the translation industry. An excess of demand over supply rarely translates into a seller’s market, and I think that the inter-agency wars I referred to above play a large part in this. By and large, translators just don’t have the economic clout to negotiate terms that genuinely reflect their value added.
Those of us “of a certain age” will certainly be able to make what we need to retire comfortably, but – as I wrote – I have some serious doubts as to whether younger generations of translators have much in the way of a viable future. And that depresses me no end.
FIGES = French, Italian, German, English, Spanish.
I agree in general with Robin’s notion that translators will be increasingly expected to offer solid subject expertise or face an erosion of real earnings. For one, the greater access to subject experts translating with various backgrounds in business, technology, etc. (“Quereinsteiger” as the Germans like to call these or perhaps other professionals who translate on the side for whatever reason) has raised expectations, while the elimination of many in-house positions for translators has reduced the access of the translating generalists to specialist knowledge. The days when a person with a degree in translation or diplomacy and world affairs could spend hours climbing into and out of crane equipment and talking to mechanics to get the terminology right for a translation are largely over, unfortunately, and much more independence and effort will be required of the generalist trying to develop specialist expertise.
But I do not believe that a decline in earnings per se is inevitable for FIGES translators, at least not for the “GE” part of that goofy acronym. The bar is simply being raised and the requirements are changing, so if you want to hop over it, you’d better get in shape
Thanks for explaining FIGES.
I agree that German is very much in demand, at least in my field (patent translation). The ratio of German to Japanese patents that I have been translating so far this year has been about 50/50, and I am charging the same rates (to direct clients) for both of these languages.
Patent law firms don’t insist on lower rates for German, as opposed to Japanese. At least I’ve never had that experience so far.
I think that the outlook for patent translators in some language combinations is quite good right now, in particular from Korean and Chinese, but also from German.
Based on my personal (or anecdotal, if you wish) experience, Japanese has been kind of slow last year, but it is coming back. And there was a lot of work in German last year and it looks like this is not going to change this year either.
I would not be pessimistic about the prospect of translators who have solid knowledge in specialized fields, such as patents. It should be similar in other fields, such as finance, I think, but I really have no idea.
Yeah, the problem with the income is the problem with the income. It’s the type of jobs that make it or break it. But you can’t always pick and choose, can you, and finding those freelance jobs that pay decently is an art in and of itself, I guess–an art or more luck than we want to admit to having (or not having). In the long run, building a network of satisfied customers is the only to go, but that takes time so… Back to work!
Wow! I’m thinking that all of these comments could serve as food for many more blog posts. Thanks to everyone for your thoughtful and insightful observations about the future of the industry and where our incomes are headed. Keep them coming!
“Wow! I’m thinking that all of these comments could serve as food for many more blog posts.”
I’m already planning one, but first I have to finish 3 jobs on my plate.
I will link it to this discussion. It is very interesting, with participation of translators form different languages and fields from three continents.
Knowledge is power!
Robin is probably one of the sharpest, most perceptive people I have met in the business, but I just can’t share his sense of pessimism. His points are, however, spot on. One would have to be blind not to see the competitive developments among agencies, and I have had quite a number of disturbing conversations with depressed agency owners affected by this trend and others. HOWEVER, at the same time I have seen a definite trend among larger businesses to go back to in-house project management and direct contact with small SLVs and freelancers. Two of my favorite companies in the world (before they became clients) cold-called me after they decided to do this and give me no end of delight with projects whose subject matter have been fascinating to me for decades. At least half my agency clients can’t touch the rates they offer either. Both had been burned too often by the likes of Star AG, TransPerfect and others and the sort of sewage that gets produced through a long chain of subcontracting to lowest bidders. Companies do get sucked in by the advertising of the “Top 10″. (I lost one client last week who failed to consult me on what to do about their need for another 9 languages and decided to let Lionbridge take over project management – my mirth was nearly endless as I realized what’s in store for them. They’ll be back at some point, either to me or another freelancer who can handle their very specialized industry and deliver good results.)
I see it this way: even if 99.99% of my language pair market is a bad match, the 0.01% that is left over is more than I or 20 others like me can handle. I just have to figure out how to position myself so those “few” can find me when I want them to. Or I have to learn how to make a very selective, focused approach to the right people and not waste my time or the time of other people by talking to the wrong crowd. But isn’t that the way any specialized business works? If the next generation offers the right skill sets, builds relationships and remains alert to opportunities, I do not see that its future will be any darker. Of course those who buy into the whole MT post-editing slave mentality as well as the helpless, pseudo-Marxist rhetoric one hears in some quarters might have some difficulties. But that’s for them to sort out.
Kevin, I’m encouraged that you’ve detected a greater element of project management in corporates in your area. Unfortunately, that’s not the case with many our corporate clients, which are in quite a wide variety of sectors. Of course, boutiques like ourselves often acquire new customers because the companies have been burned by the Big Agency model – ’twas ever thus, I think, and I have no doubt that this will continue.
Equally, we have successfully acquired new customers in highly competitive beauty contests in the face of sometimes quite desperate price competition from Big Agencies. I can sell a helluva sight better than any of the Big Agency sales wonks (sorry, that should be “customer development managers”), and of course I’m selling a service that I actually believe in. Plus, how many sales guys are able to chat about the latest IASB/FASB financial instruments screw-up with the CFO?
I have no serious concerns (possibly apart from running out of energy) about those of us already in the global translation industry Champions League to maintain our positions and make a good living. We can never rest on our laurels, and we have to be really quick to adapt to (better: anticipate) structural shifts in our target market segments that will alter the pattern of demand for our services. But that’s not rocket science.
My concerns are for the next generations, not for our own. I’m trying to do a bit of crystal ball gazing here, in part to work out what I can do to “send the elevator back down”. For the German-English-German market, where solo freelances and specialised boutiques have traditionally accounted for a significantly larger market share than is the case in e.g. the US (and probably the UK), I have noted a growing tendency in the mass market segments towards intermediation, and I think that this is one of the side-effects of globalisation that isn’t going to go away.
Another observation is that the average quality of new entrants to the profession appears to be declining. While this has been the case for a good ten years for English native speakers (translating from German), this trend now also appears to be affecting the German native speakers, based on what professors and lecturers at German universities and university-level institutes are saying (Chatham House rules, though). Anecdotal evidence, I know, but that’s all there is.
One of the problems as I see it is that new and recent entrants now face more of an uphill struggle than we ever did to make it into the magic circle of high-income specialised translators (and there’s plenty of room for them if they make it, as demand far outstrips supply here). How are they going to survive the rite of passage of eight to ten years (and quite possibly longer) of working for often crap rates for what are (behind closed doors) actually pretty translator-hostile Big Agencies, while at the same time investing in the training and domain knowledge acquisition they need to progress their careers?
I’ve seen too many talented young people leave the profession in recent years, all of them graduates of traditional translation programmes. That’s why I now advise potential translation students to get at least three to five years’ work experience in another field before they decide they want to study. That’s also why I’m spending an increasing amount of time on teaching and research linked to specialised translation degree courses. I think that most of the current translation degree courses (at least the ones I’m familiar with) are fundamentally flawed and, by and large, are producing translators for a market that stopped existing towards the end of the last centure.
Mutter, mutter, grumble, grumble, young people these days, …
Hi Robin. I vaguely remember you from CompuServe. I seem to remember well only people that I was fighting with there.
Those were the days.
“… The growing market power and reach of increasingly large agencies. Their main aim is to make their numbers, which means reducing the share of actual translation costs. They are able to leverage informational asymmetries to their advantage, safe in the knowledge that, whatever price they’re prepared to pay for translations, somebody, somewhere will accept it.”
I largely agree with most of what you are saying, but I come to a different conclusion.
Most of these “somebodies” who will accept low rates from large agencies will produce inferior work and the clients will eventually figure it out.
The way to not only survive but even prosper (during good years) in the brave new world is to undermine the business model of large agencies by simply not working for them.
It may be difficult for your local mom and pop store to compete with Walmart, but it is not that difficult for an individual translator to compete with large agencies, in particular since they produce a lot of garbage.
The translation market is huge. If professional translators build their business model on the differentiation between their personalized expert service and “corporate” services that are provided by predatory agencies who by necessity use a lot of what I call subprime translators, they will be in a good position, provided that they know what they are doing.
And they can still work for smaller agencies or occasionally function as a small agency. I too do both as well, although I really don’t like being an agency one bit.
“Most of these “somebodies” who will accept low rates from large agencies will produce inferior work and the clients will eventually figure it out.”
The issue though is that this work is NOT always inferior, and the low rates do not necessarily indicate that it’s “bad” work. I can give your multiple examples of this, though not here.
There are no regulations in this industry, translators can charge what they will, and the great majority of the world is much cheaper to live in than EU and the USA. As I pointed out above (sorry about ranting there, this post hit a very sore point), people in other countries can afford to charge a third or a quarter of what translators in “expensive”, FIGES countries do – and still earn an excellent income (by their standards).
Thanks to the Internet, the world is becoming smaller and changing dramatically every year. It’s no skin off some agency’s nose to charge a Western rate for a job, outsource it to an agency or a translator in another country (no less professional, just cheaper) at a third of the cost, and hire a native language proofreader. The resulting translation is high quality, the profit margin is doubled and everyone is happy.
Unfortunately, I think this trend will continue and grow as more people have access to the internet and realise that they, too, can have a slice of that tasty pie. And who can blame them if the wages in their home country are barely subsistence level, and here they can earn 4-5 times the amount, while still charging less than the existing translators do. They have kids they need to feed, too.
The only saving grace at the moment is that it’s hard to get money in and out of “cheaper” countries – Paypal won’t touch them, banks are expensive – but that will change. Paypal, after all, only existed for 8 or so years.
“It’s no skin off some agency’s nose to charge a Western rate for a job, outsource it to an agency or a translator in another country (no less professional, just cheaper) at a third of the cost, and hire a native language proofreader. The resulting translation is high quality, the profit margin is doubled and everyone is happy.”
Fortunately, it does not really work that way, at least not in my language and subject combination – translation of Japanese and German patents to English.
There may be some translators of Japanese and German patents living in “inexpensive” countries such as India, China or Thailand, but their Japanese, German, and English is usually a major issue. I know that their English is poor to horrible because they keep sending me their resumes. And I think that their Japanese or German is probably even worse.
And who can proofread and fix a poor translation of a Japanese patent, for example? You would need somebody with a lot of experience, who really is fluent (though not necessarily native) both in Japanese and in English.
You would need somebody like me. This would be quite expensive and besides, people like me don’t do this kind of thing (real men eat over the sink and they don’t proofread translations that were done by other people).
Also, dear Daria, everything depends on who your client is. Patent lawyers don’t really care how much they pay for the translation as long as their client approves the cost because they don’t pay me – their client does. But they can’t really use a patent translation, regardless how cheap it is, if they don’t understand the English or if the technical terms are wrong. Machine translations of most Japanese patents since about 1991 are available for free. But because the translations are often used in court proceedings, they have to be accurate and look good. They don’t have to be perfect, only very good. MT is useless for this kind of thing, and so are translations from “subprime translators” in China or India.
OTOH, I am sure that the model that you have described is being attempted and practiced, probably with some measure of success, constantly by greedy fly-by-night translation agencies in Western countries. I also keep getting offers from agencies in China who are proposing to me exactly the kind of thing that you described.
Unfortunately for your language combination, there is not much demand for Russian patents. I usually get a couple of them a year and I translate them myself if it is a subject that I like, such as chemistry, or if they are really complicated (I don’t know technical terms in Russian very well), I send them to a Russian translator I have known for decades who does very good work for 10 cents a word.
Do not forget about taxation. I am from the Czech Republic and usually charge EUR 0.08 (and considerably less for translating books but that’s another story). While this is far from ridiculously low, some of you might consider this rate too low for a professional because when you say EUR 0.08 you basically imagine the living standard that you can enjoy with that rate. But if you are from Western Europe, taxes and social security contributions probably swallow up to 50% of what you earn. So when I say EUR 0.08, you probably think of a standard of life that would be possible with EUR 0.04, your after-tax rate. But my after-tax rate is about EUR 0.07 (no kidding – the sum of my taxes, social security and health insurance has never gobbled up more than 15% of my earnings because for reasons I will not delve into now the Czech taxation system is currently extremely generous for freelancers). To reach the same after-tax rate in Western Europe, you would need to charge EUR 0.14 (or even more in Italy or Belgium, as I hear). I know that some of you are able to maintain even significantly higher rates but I dare say that even most FIGES translators would jump for joy if they had somewhat regular work at EUR 0.10, which – in net terms – would still make them worse of than me. I would not mind charging EUR 0.10 or more but I would price myself out of the market because most translators in my pairs operate in the same favorable tax environment. Although I have not been able to get over the EUR 0.10 mark yet, I do not consider myself a cheapo. I earn about 5 times the average wage in my country. While some goods are more expensive than in Western Europe, my overall cost of living is certainly lower.
I can’t figure out the difference between European and American taxes. I have never seen an honest, side by side comparison of all US and European taxes in US press. I think that they can’t publish it because it would be really explosive information. When they say taxes here, they usually mean what they for some reason like to call “income taxes”, which is a relatively small portion of all the taxes that the unwashed masses have to pay, i.e. people who make less than about 100 thousand dollars, to make it look like rich people pay more taxes than those of us who actually have to do honest work for a living.
I once asked a friend who lives in Czech Republic (Tabor) how much were his real estate taxes. He said:”I don’t know”. His house is similar to mine and I pay about five thousand dollars a year, not counting insurance. So after some searching, he found a receipt which said that he paid about 50 dollars.
So my real estate taxes alone here in America are 100 times higher than those in European countries.
I like to look at gorgeous houses abroad advertised in New York Times. I saw a mansion in Luxembourg there recently for two and half million Euros. I noticed that the taxes were 500 Euros.
Like I said, I can’t figure out the difference between European and American taxes, but I am pretty sure that we are being taxed to death here in “the land of the free”.
I am not sure that the difference between European and US taxes is that huge when you factor in health insurance in the US.
In France you pay about 35% in mandatory social security contributions, plus your personal income tax.
In the US you have the self-employoment social security contributions, which I believe are around 15%, plus personal income tax, too, but you have to buy private health insurance on top of that (unless you are lucky enough to be covered by a spouse’s plan).
People complain about the taxes all the time in France but I honestly don’t think they are THAT high.
[...] was an interesting post on the Thoughts On Translation blog recently on the subject of translators’ rates and the compensation potential, followed by an [...]
one question ? I have submitted my views, but deleted ? is it because you only prefer fellow translators to comment ?
Please don’t take otherwise.. I am bit curious to know..
“Fortunately, it does not really work that way, at least not in my language and subject combination – translation of Japanese and German patents to English.”
You are very fortunate indeed.
You are in a good specialization, you are in demand, you have build a good network of contacts, you live in a Western country, and most importantly – you work in well-paying language combination. Somehow I suspect that your equivalents in Thailand or Malaysia are paid a fraction of what you get, and even people who are just starting in the field are not as fortunate as you are…
Personally, I don’t translate patents, as I simply don’t enjoy it. My specialisations are in different areas. I read through a couple of patents when I was planning my direction, but it’s just not for me.
“…a Russian translator I have known for decades who does very good work for 10 cents a word.”
0.10 USD is 0.07 Euro at the current exchange rate, and according to the Proz discussions and “community rates”, FIGE translators won’t even touch this because it’s too low… I am certain that your friend does a great job, but again that demonstrates the market for my language combination, doesn’t it? After decades of work, 7 Euro cents per word, when a FIGE translator can demand (and probably get) more than that in the beginning of their career. Sad, isn’t it?
Interesting discussion from Kevin and Robin. I am “between” the old and new generations (I’m 39 and have been translating for 10 years). I teach students the business aspects of translation at a translation school in France, and I do worry about these up-and-coming young translators (that said, they do seem pretty lucid about the market, realistic about working with agencies, and are open to creative approaches to marketing to win direct customers)!
I think translation excellence, solid writing skills, subject-matter expertise, knowledge of how customers’ businesses work, and the ability to provide *solutions* to customers’ business problems (plus the ability to sell your services as value-adding solutions to real business problems rather than just selling words or hours and articulate this in terms your customers can relate to) are just the start.
I think we often forget we are in a *service* business. As part of our marketing efforts we’ve done a lot of work asking our customers WHY they keep coming back to us (despite rates that are 2 to 3x higher than certain other well-entrenched local providers) and they *rarely* talk about the quality of the translations. What really matters to them is the quality of *service* we provide. We are always right on the front lines with them, willing to help out when projects go haywire or when deadlines get tight. We are part therapist, part hand-holder, part babysitter…we *reassure* our customers that whatever happens, they can count on us to make them look good at work. I don’t know if this is a skill that can be *learned* or if it is just a customer-oriented mindset that comes naturally to us. Of course, we think our work is good
and I think it needs to be, but this is not what our customers tend to point out when asked.
Whatever the case may be, I think a sense of *service* is a really big part of what enables us to charge higher rates, win loyalty, and, to get back to the subject of this post, earn a satisfying income.
Hi Sarah: it’s been quite a long time since Paris!
Some of the younger freelances are certainly better at business and marketing skills than was the case 20 years ago, but I do wonder whether they’re trying to oversell themselves sometimes. It’s happened to me several times in the past couple of years that a translator has told me at a conference or seminar that they tried to market their services to (insert name of listed German company) and were told, sorry, but why don’t you get in touch with our supplier F&B? But they were too frightened to do that, afraid that they’d be rejected. So, it was OK to try to market themselves to a larger corporate, but not to us? Bit of a disconnect there, I think. Plus, when will these guys learn that corporates aren’t interested in which school they went to, or what their hobbies are? A cold pitch requires an entirely different value proposition (I hope you’re teaching them this!)
But you’re spot-on with the service aspect. I think it’s something we all tend to forget from time to time, especially when customers are being a real pain in the butt and we’re metaphorically sticking pins into customer dolls. The flip side of the coin, though, is that the same customers must appreciate that we’re service providers, not servants. “Flexibility” doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) mean dropping everything else at a moment’s notice because a customer can’t get their act together (we have a pinboard notice that says “An inability to manage processes at your end does not mean a crisis at ours”). I’m not talking about genuine customer emergencies here (more than once we’ve worked more than 24 hours without a break to help save a customer), but about the depressingly recurrent situation where customers “suddenly remember” that a text they’ve been writing for the past two weeks needs to be translated for tomorrow, that sort of thing.
RE Robin’s comment about good-but-not-great translators possibly starting to chip away at high-end rates, that’s interesting (and scary…god I hope not…I need to work about 20 more years to retire and need to maintain my current income to retire in style!).
As a very small business the only evidence we have is anecdotal, of course (and yes, why don’t academics look at the economics of the industry??). Interestingly, when we quote rates between 25 and 50 euro cents per word (our usual range from normal to crazy-complicated or mind-bogglingly urgent), we are *never, ever* in competition with other bids at, say, 22 cents or even 18 cents. The competing bids are *always* from the low end of the market (under 10 to around 17 cents). I don’t know if this means anything (maybe not!), but every time it happens I say to myself, “Isn’t that interesting”.
Looking at our local market (which is the Rhône-Alpes region, France’s second-largest economy after Paris) there don’t seem to be any providers (agencies or freelancers) in the middle…or at least I’ve never encountered any. There are the really high ones (specialized freelancers and one agency in our region that I know of) and the mass-market bulk-translation agencies and nonprofessional freelancers.
Of course they’re chipping away – in many ways they have no option but to try to move up the scale because the ground is beginning to disappear under their feet. In my experience, though, they generally don’t want to make the necessary investments, especially in domain knowledge and sheer translation skills, to justify the higher prices. But (as they say in the risk factor chapters of securities offering prospectuses), no assurance can be given that, at some point in the future, customers might not be willing to accept a lower level of quality at correspondingly lower prices, especially if a customer’s perceived value added of the translation services offered does not warrant higher prices.
We can defend our turf – I’m convinced of that, all the more so if we work together in partnerships or specialist boutiques. But it ain’t going to get any easier and there’s a risk that, at some point, our crystals will start draining.
@Sara:
The problem with private health insurance in US is that it is basically fraud perpetrated on the helpless public, not really insurance. When my son was born 20 years ago, I discovered that pregnancy was a “condition” that was not covered by my insurance. It was hidden somewhere in the fine print, we had no idea. Obviously, why would you cover pregnancy in a health insurance policy issued to a young married couple, right? If the wife gets pregnant, the insurance company would lose money. So I had to pay all the expenses out of may pocket in addition to premiums. I could talk about other examples how “health insurance” works here on and on. The insurance companies basically use our children as hostages to extort higher and higher premiums from us, while limiting the coverage.
Obama promised to do away with this, but that was just another thing that he lied about, of course. The only change after the so called “reform” of the health insurance system is that the private insurance companies now have even more power than before, and the rates have been going up accordingly. At one point the whole system is likely to implode as the greed of private insurance companies is limitless.
Had he really wanted to reform the system, he would have created an alternative to private insurance companies, as Obama the candidate promised, who are the real domestic terrorists. He could have simply opened up Medicare, which is health insurance for people over 66, to everybody. (Private health insurance companies don’t want old people because you can’t make money on them). But Obama and Democrats did not even allow discussions about that. Protesters (a group of doctors) who wanted to talk about this during the discussions in Congress were arrested.
I don’t know how high the taxes are in Frances, but at least you get real health insurance in return. In America, the whole so called health insurance system is mostly fraud.
But you are right, an honest comparison of taxes here and in Europe would have to include also how much is spent on health insurance and medical care.
It’s not surprising that health insurance crops up in the discussion; Germany is less enlightened than countries like Sweden and the UK, and here too it can eat up a large chunk of one’s income, though not nearly as much as in the US. And private insurance here is a crooked game as well. I’ve tried in vain for a decade to get some. But at least the sliding scale for the statutory insurance here means that struggling persons who have insurance don’t pay much for it, and if they can’t even afford that, there’s probably some Sozialamt to cover their backs. As there should be. If my fellow citizens in my native country really had an understanding of the indirect costs of that dysfunctional health care non-system (not to mention the disastrous education), they would storm the Pentagon to demand a change in spending priorities.
I get quite a laugh when my hyperconservative brother-in-law in California, my brother and others start spouting off on a subject they know nothing about: European taxes. When you add up all the little municipal fees, health insurance, pension schemes, etc. there isn’t much difference, not enough to make or break a viable business. And any business in a place that doesn’t invest in its people and infrastructure and tax to do this had better worry about its long-term viability. Fox News serves the Murdoch agenda and that of other parasites and has little interest in providing the thralls with real information upon which they might act.
But enough of general politics. We translators aren’t any more victims of those conditions than anyone else. Like Sara, I find Robin’s comment about the not-so-great possibly undermining the high end an interesting one and would like to hear more about that. If he’s referring to linguistic skills, I think there are probably any number of good-but-not-great linguists playing on the high field. They probably balance out their lack of verbal brilliance by providing the other things Sara describes, and I say hurray for them! I have enough brilliant but socially incompetent people among my friends and family – one could argue that I belong on that list, at least the incompetent part – and I don’t think the world needs more of them. We have enough artístes who consider themselves translators but aren’t the practical and social equals of a young dog.
I hope Corinne doesn’t mind us hijacking her post, but this is really interesting
I, too, would like to hear from Robin (Robin, maybe you need to start a blog? I bet you’d get tons of subscribers!) to find out if I need to start downsizing my lifestyle.
Kevin, I hope your social skills are better than those of the 11-month-old Border Collie currently on my lap licking my face (well…it IS Friday 5 pm, he must be trying to tell me something…).
When would I have the time to run a blog? Sorry, but that’s an unrealistic proposition, at least this year. Quite apart from translating/revising/proofing, there’s the training and teaching work, XBRL, research papers, writing the dictionary (*very* slowly), and so on. Plus walking the dog, having a life, family matters (my mother will be 90 this year), that sort of thing. So the blog will have to wait until I (semi-)retire, I think. Sorry…
[...] Comments « How much do freelance translators earn? Is it enough? [...]
An off-topic comment here earlier this week–namely, that a machine translation from Portuguese passed the ATA certification exam–caught the attention of several of us who are involved with the certification program. Lest some unaware reader think that machines are now taking and passing ATA’s certification exam, I’ll mention a few facts (thanks for the clarification, Corinne).
The comment was a reference to a study of machine translation, CAT tools and Google Translate, which Cris Silva and Giovana Boselli conducted and presented at an ATA conference and elsewhere. For their experiment, they prepared three English software localization texts, written specifically for the study. The texts were pre-translated into Portuguese in Trados, and the 0% matches were fed into Google Translate. To analyze the results, Cris and Giovana then consulted the ATA Cert program’s error-marking framework to define error categories, and they devised their own scoring system to determine error points. Of the three translated texts, one came out looking fairly good. That was the gist of the study as I understand it; Cris and/or Giovana may wish to add to or clarify my comments.
As a POR>ENG certification exam grader, I just wanted to make the point that there was little connection between Cris & Giovana’s machine translation study and the ATA exam. I can also say that, in any event, a machine could not take the exam, which is still taken in handwritten form with no electronic devices of any kind.
Interesting. I’d like to see the methodology and test protocol for this experiment. At least the way you describe it, I have the impression that the researchers tweaked the system a bit (“devised their own scoring system to determine error points”).
I think that the only legimitate way to validate this sort of experiment would be by applying what is essentially an “MT Turing Test” approach, with the grader completely unaware that a particular text has been translated by an MT system.
@Sara, no worries, I don’t mind at all! Actually I’m really enjoying reading the responses. I wasn’t thrilled with the original post but I decided to run it anyway, and the comments are much more scintillating than what I wrote. And I agree, Robin needs a blog!
Sara, I also agree with you about the odd absence of translators in the mid-range. It’s not often that I talk to people who charge, as you pointed out, say 16-20 cents a word. People at 15 cents or below are mostly working with agencies and people at 20 cents are above are mostly with direct clients. In one sense, maybe it’s because freelancers who work with direct clients often try to price themselves a tiny bit below what they think an agency will bid (not sure if this is true or not). And I’ve heard several people in the 40-50 cent range say that the higher you go, the less competition there is, so there’s that too.
Thanks for everyone’s fantastic comments!!
@Corinne
As far as I know, the going rate that agencies will pay for translation of Japanese patents to English is still 17 to 19 cents, although I understand that there are people who will work for 14 cents, or even as little as 10 cents a word.
I wonder, who are the people who can command more than 40 cents a word and what is it that they translate? What is their secret?
I try to stay under 30 cents with direct clients, even on rush jobs. I am pretty sure that I would lose them if I asked for 40 cents or more.
@DorisS
Thanks for the clarification.
One commenter from Japan who appears frequently on my blog uses the “computer passed the ATA exam in Portuguese” meme as incontrovertible evidence that human translators are done for and that Japanese translators are next in the line. He is absolutely certain that the only thing that there will be still left for people like me to do in a few years will be editing machine translations. He seems to derive some kind of perverse pleasure from this peculiar notion.
He is obviously not very bright, but I am not really sure what to do with him as I don’t want to censor anybody.
I am trying to ignore him, but it is really, really hard for me to do that …..
So thanks again.
@Steve, a couple of people in the 40+ cents per word bracket read this blog, so I’ll let them out themselves if they want to. My sense if you want to make that kind of money is:
-it’s good to live in your source language country or at least make a few trips there every year in order to press the flesh
-find clients who think of their texts as their children
-you have to get out of the office and talk to people a lot of the time. This sounds basic but a lot of translators do not want to do this or are not good at it. They want to make 40 cents a word but they do not want to go to an industry-specific seminar (for example) and talk to clients on their own level.
And I should also say that for the people I’m thinking of, this 40+ cents per word is their *base rate.* I’ve made that much on some projects but there have always been special circumstances. When I start charging that much for everyday work, I’ll tell you the secret
“When I start charging that much for everyday work, I’ll tell you the secret
”
Promises, promises …..
I agree with Corinne that living in your source language country is good (I do) and being industry-specialized (we are…I do B to B marketing mainly in high-tech and my business partner corporate finance). We also get out of the office a lot and try to meet our customers on their turf. 25 cts is our base rate (translation +proofing of for-publication-quality texts) and most of our work is at that rate. I would love it to be 40 cents…maybe someday…(or not, depending on Robin’s prognosis for the high end of the market! ….Robin??)
Incidentally, for some kinds of texts (white papers, annual reports, etc.) we rarely go direct, there is almost always a marcomm agency involved, altho we do meet with people from the direct client’s (we are not the typical “invisible” translators) for almost every project. More rarely, there is a translation agency involved, but this is very limited given our rates.
To get back to income…Would be interesting to hear the 40-centers tell us how long it took them to get from, say 20 cts to 40 cts and the impact on their overall income (increase commensurate with the rate increase, or not because maybe they are choosier about their projects and do less volume at the higher rate?).
@Corinne:
I remember from lurking on various online groups in Japan that the going rate in Japan for translating Japanese patents to English for filing (as opposed to for information) is 40 yen per English word, which is about 50 cents in dollars.
I occasionally get German patents for filing and I charge the same rates for them, regardless of the purpose of the translation. I never get Japanese patents for translation for filing, I am not sure why. I think it’s probably because the people in Japan who do this know how to protect their niche.
But I seem to recall that at least one old timer who charges this rate in Japan sometime complains about lack of work and that he also keeps wondering whether his job will be outsourced to agencies in US where the rates are lower.
Incidentally, now that I know that some people start their “best rates” at 40 cents, I think I understand how translators of languages such as Spanish or Russian who get paid around 10 cents feel about people like me.
I agree, there is absolutely no justice in this world!!!
Interesting thread.
). (You were wrong! 
)
). And a year or so ago I had a bizarre encounter (at an SFT training event) with a 40-ish translator who explained that she was unable to find clients because she worked into a minority language — Chinese, as it turned out. (Chinese a minority language?).
). *Regardless of anybody’s language combination* (I know that is a sweeping statement but it is absolutely true in my experience), there always are, someplace in the world, 2000 words a day in that combination looking for a safe home in an expert translator hands. Really. You just have to adopt the habits and mindset to identify them and reel them in.
@Robin: you’re too gloomy, buddy. We had a discussion about this some 20 years ago at an ITI conference (I was talking about a rising wave lifting all boats — oh, and the importance of signing one’s work — and even then you were warning that we were all about to hit a non-glass ceiling
Even so, and in a general way, I really don’t buy all the talk about a Golden Age.
Why? Because there is still a lot of very high-priced work going begging. As one contributor to this discussion has remarked, there are lots of people seriously interested in charging 40 cents a word, but not doing what you have to do to justify it (e.g., attending client events just to keep in the picture, even when you don’t have a job for that particular group on the boil; reading, reading, reading; working on your own writing skills; delivering the kind of service that Sara describes, etc.).
There’s also the whole business of tracking the news (including long and short-term trends) to identify the areas where demand is set to rise — and preparing for it. Managing your client roster dynamically and all that jazz. Who’s doing it? Not too many translators, in my experience.
Moving right along (!): Daria, I often wonder about the “but my language pair is a minor one so I’m out of luck” argument. In the SFT (French association) we’ve got a translator who works from, inter alia, Greek into Cambodian (talk about niche markets!) and he seems to be doing OK. Well, he sure has sewn up that segment, in any case
My response is always something like “Well, how many words do you need to translate to (1) survive [OK, OK, I understand we've all got to pay the rent -- but if you're a professional surely you want to aim higher than that?] or (2) prosper?” Number 2 being more interesting, not least because clients who pay you more also value your input more.
And the answer I come up with is something like 1000-2000 words a day if you are working at 30 to 40 cents a word (fewer words — logically — if you start pushing 50-60-70
Re-moving right along, Vera is absolutely right to raise the gross vs net issue, because that’s important, too. In France, the diff between gross and net for freelancers is something like 48% (but Steve (hi Steve! ah Flefo!) we do have excellent healthcare here).
My question for translators who would like to earn more and claim it is impossible to ask them why they aren’t tracking markets more closely, identifying hot topics, acquiring the skills and knowledge they need to work in them, and then getting out and about to let ideal clients (of whom there are many, often burned by the big agencies and delighted to work with known entities — I see precisely the trend Kevin has mentioned in my market) know they exist.
I can give an example if you like — or several — the latest from this very week.
FWIW, my own base rates are €0.40/word for legacy clients and clients in regions outside Paris and €0.45-50 for new ones, although I’m in the process of shifting everybody over to hourly rates. There was a lull at the end of 2009-early 2010 but business has come roaring back since.
One of the encouraging things my work with professional associations has brought me is the opportunity to get to know younger translators (I am an aged 58) who are really very good. So I’m not all that gloomy. Really not.
Hi Chris: it was 1995, at the ITI conference in Edinburgh. And to be perfectly frank, nothing has happened since then to persuade me otherwise: not the tech boom in the late 1990s when we would translate a 250-page IPO prospectus over a long weekend and then talk to the customer about what it was going to cost them (think arms and legs), not the Big Bang of IFRS adoption that was one big party, and not even the fact that for the past few years, around half of our work has been hourly-based (and our hourly rates are apparently about the highest in Germany, we’re told).
Here in Germany at least, there *is* such a thing as a market price ceiling for translation services (glass or otherwise). It doesn’t mean you can’t rise above that ceiling from time to time, but it’s most definitely there.
At the moment, we’re working 80-90 hour weeks for reasons that are entirely beyond our control: we could double our prices and it wouldn’t reduce our workload by a minute. But we wouldn’t have any customers this time next year. What I’ve found really instructive is how much German corporates talk to each other about pretty trivial things like translation prices. They really do know that if industry leader X is paying Y for translations, they’re not going to pay a cent more.
Please understand that the market you work in (I don’t know what the smallest possible segment of a market would be called) simply doesn’t exist in Germany. In a way, you’re operating in an almost Crusoe-like economy, and that’s absolutely great. Nobody’s begrudging you your success (at least I hope not). But it’s not necessarily reproducible, and certainly not here in Germany (which is of course Europe’s largest and most diverse translation market).
That doesn’t mean that what you offer doesn’t get done here: it does, but it’s spread over a larger number of economic actors. Germany is in many ways still very much a Taylorist economy, which is for example why the Big Agencies, with their host of ancillary services (such as DTP, fulfilment, etc.), haven’t made the inroads into the financial glossy market that they have in many other countries. Long may it stay that way!
It’s always good to let the warm glow of Chris Durban’s upbeat mood about just about everything wash over you and cast a veil over reality for a while, but after this feelgood factor’s worn off, you come down to earth again with a bump and a sort of vague feeling that we’re living in different worlds.
One question though: why on earth do you charge different rates to customers depending on where they’re located? That’s definitely a new one on me!
@Robin re “the market you [Chris] work in (I don’t know what the smallest possible segment of a market would be called)”
How about “nano-market”? Nano-technology being such a hot and very upbeat area (just my style, don’t you think?
).
My point then would be that *the nature of the translation market as a whole* (which, as you and Steve and I all agree, is a misnomer since we are talking about hundreds of thousands of sub- and sub-sub-segments where very different conditions may apply) is that it is built on nano-markets.
Which means hot tips for translators interested in upping their game might be (1) be aware of this segmentation (many translators aren’t; they try to pitch to everybody, all at once); (2) analyze areas (including micro-areas and nano-areas) where demand is on the rise *and* which offer a good fit with your skills; (3) work very hard to develop those existing skills even further.
On the ATA business practices list, agency reps in particular (but also freelance translators hesitant about revisiting their approach) imply and sometimes state outright “oh well, Chris works with these highly specialized financial texts, so she’s an outlier, you can’t apply her approach or prices elsewhere; don’t even try” — well, I don’t buy that, either. (And, er, I wonder if you’re not doing a variation on it here, Robin.
)
Here’s a thought: specialization is a very effective tool for opening doors and getting a positive flow flowing with clients. And sure, I translate specialized financial and strategy texts, but a lot of the work I do is in fact more general (although still in a corporate/business context).
Which is where Sara’s comments on service come into play: there are so many slipshod, half-baked suppliers out there (big and small), that positive experiences mean your client passes your name around. At which point you apply your specialist prices in these areas, too. Which is only normal. The challenge then is to maintain your own focus, resisting the appeal of the bulk & anti-nano sirens that might pull you, too, off the precipice into slipshod and half-baked waters.
I have to get back to an urgent job right now, but first @Corinne: you and Sara both commented on the sparsely populated “middle section” of the market (price-wise). I, too, see many FLers who work with direct clients doing the “price myself a tiny bit lower than agencies” run. It’s curious, isn’t it. Ultimately it means they are only partially convinced of the value of their services, since they are still letting perceived “big guys” (whom they often quite rightly criticize) set the standard.
Clients (good clients) are in a totally different place. And a lot of them have work looking for expert, service-oriented translators.
Language alert!
When I wrote “The challenge then is to maintain your own focus, resisting the appeal of the bulk & anti-nano sirens that might pull you, too, off the precipice into slipshod and half-baked waters” I was fooling around with words hahaha.
But a nano-second after hitting “send”, I realized that concept is all wrong, of course: sirens lure seafarers onto the rocks, not off precipices, don’t they. And “half-baked waters” is no doubt over-egging the fooling-around-with-language pudding.
Apologies.
@ Chris
We don’t have a healthcare system here, the entire industry is a big crime scene in America. I have a theory that Obama has an evil twin and some really evil rich people switched him for candidate Obama and put his evil brother in the White House. Otherwise one would have to assume that Obama knew that he was lying all along and did not really care one bit, which would really hurt. So I’m trying to find some evidence about his evil twin. I’ll let you know how it goes.
@Robin
If you have time to read this blog, you have time to write a blog.
I think that you don’t really want to waste too much time in our little 井戸端会議 (idobata kaigi), which is understandable.
For those who don’t read Japanese or Chinese, idobata kaigi means literally “a meeting at the water well”. In old Japan and China, old women who had to carry water from the well to the house would meet for hours at the well to swap juicy gossip about their neighbors.
The tradition is alive and well in Chesapeake, VA, except that these women, wives of my neighbors who are mostly military officers, are still young, and they meet at the cul-de-sac in front of our house, pretending to watch their kids riding bikes and skateboards around the neighborhood while eagerly swapping savage gossip for hours.
Perhaps “fishwives gathered around the gutting trough” would be a more accurate analogy.
But seriously, if I were to start a blog, there would be occasional sudden bursts of activity followed by months of silence (what would I call it: “Translator ADHD”?). Not worth the candle, I think. It’s also the reason why I don’t do Facebook et al. So much to do, so little time…
@Robin, I bet you do enough writing for your other projects that you could recycle something into a blog post once a week in about ten minutes. We run two blogs…managing a blog doesn’t have to be that time consuming…c’mon!!! I’ll be your first subscriber!
@Chris, you, too while we’re on the subject of blogs (or at least get FA&WB an RSS feed)!
Concerning Robin’s comment about Chris’ differentiated rates, while it may seem odd, it does seem to be a reality in France. There’s Paris, and there are the “provinces”. In Rhône-Alpes, with the exception of maybe ONE agency, our rate of 25 cents is much higher than the deeply-entrenched local agencies (who charge around 17 tops…so you can imagine their outsourcing rates, yikes). However, we have AGENCY clients in Paris who pay our direct-client rates here in the boonies. Then there’s the makeup of the local economy…lots of high-tech, but mainly SMEs (even though many are at the cutting edge of their markets, they still have the stereotypical penny-pinching general manager counting cents per word and often lack the strategic marketing vision required to take their communications to the next level and be willing to pay for it!). So if we can get in the door at 25 cents, we are happy!
I understand. I hope you will at least leave a comment at this idobata kaigi.
It is a pity, though, that you and Chris don’t have a blog.
Your translation market is so different from patent translation, for instance. We all know and understand our little niche quite well, but we usually don’t realize that other people may be working under completely different conditions, translating completely different subjects for completely different customers.
There is no such thing as “translation”, just like there is no such thing as “writing”.
A very important insight, Steve: there really isn’t such a creature as a homogeneous “translation market”, but rather thousands of translation markets (sub-sub-segments?), some quite self-contained, others with links to other segments. Our market for financial and corporate legal translations is very different to Chris’s financial translation market, for example, but we also know providers in quite a wide range of other segments and often work together with them (or pass on customer inquiries that we won’t touch ourselves), so we do get a feel for where the touch points might be.
It’s difficult – and sometimes very dangerous – to generalise about our industry, and you’re right: sometimes we’re so focused on our own little niche, we get a distorted picture of what reality is like outside our own box (or outside our own comfort zone). Some principles and observations are certainly overarching, but they generally tend to be at a more abstract level, rather than applicable to a particular market/segment.
Again, such a pity that there are no rigorous studies of the economics of translation.
One generalization that I would like to offer is that translators don’t have to work for large agencies or fight for scraps of low paid work on venues such as Proz.
Because the market is so incredibly fragmented, large agencies account for only a small fraction of the workload available from other sources, either directly from the end-client or from smaller agencies, which I would call agencies with a human face.
I can understand that many people don’t want to spend the time, money and effort that is needed to figure out how to match a single translator with direct clients. It is a lot of work and many good translators are very bad at the business of running a business.
However, I don’t understand why intelligent people keep working for huge predatory agencies, mostly at low rates and with brutal deadlines. I think that in the long run, “invisible translators” who don’t want to market themselves directly, either in person like Chris or you, or through a website, which is what I am doing, will still be much better off working for small agencies run by ethical and intelligent operators.
I believe that small outfits actually actually command a much higher share of the translation market than big agencies because there are so many of them out there and the market is so big.
This is the only type of agency that I am still willing to work for. Maybe things are different in other types of translation, but it really works like this in patent translation.
To paraphrase George Orwell, in the translation business, “small is gooood, big is baaaaad”.
Steve, you’re right about the agencies. I work with quite a number of them, but they are inevitably small, very personal and mostly very competent shops. It’s such a pleasure to work with some of these people that I’m nuts enough to prefer them to many of my direct clients. But the large shops? Forget it. I can’t claim to have been abused by most of them, but I just don’t like the vibes. After Tek in Spain tried to get me to QA several hundred pages of a manual in just a few hours by random sampling, I decided that I just can’t have my name associated with fools like that. And TransPerfect? My God. It took years to get those spammers to leave me alone with their last-minute nonsense. The smaller agencies I know generally have brains and hearts and do a decent job of working with both.
@Kevin:
I should have qualified my generalization by saying that some of the small agencies can be just as mean, greedy and nasty as their bigger brethren.
But I think that all the large agencies are to be avoided because they are just too predatory.
It’s just in the nature of the beast. The same could be probably said about small companies and big corporations.
It’s not the predatory nature of the big agencies that has offended me most, Steve, but rather their mindless, mechanistic ways of doing things and their lack of organization and responsibility. My relationship with the big T in NY began years ago with them losing my invoice for something like 6 or 7 months. I re-sent it several times too. I don’t think they were trying not to pay me; I think they just didn’t care or were simply too disorganized to be taken seriously as a business. Any time I hear some PM say “our procedures require…” with regard to some odious concession they want (free translation tests, for example), I realize I’m dealing with an organization too big or too brainless or both to be of interest. And these are exactly the ones to avoid if you do want to keep your nerves and have reasonable returns when dealing with agencies.
Interesting to catch up on this discussion — I was away all day yesterday at an SFT training event.
— about how to hook up with good clients and leave the bad ones behind.
Where I, as is my wont, I did my best to (oh dear, get ready for this…) spread “the warm glow of [my ever] upbeat mood” over 60+ translators interested in building up their direct-client portfolios.
Not that I’d describe it precisely like that however.
This was a 3-hour session with extremely concrete information — including a guided tour of a typical good client brain with excursions into “priorities and decision-making processes”, simulations, tips, even mini-scripts
This is a regular course run by the SFT and feedback (including success stories by translators who have actually applied the methods and suggestions) is encouraging.
Having said that (and @Robin in particular), I am under no illusions. As I noted in my earlier post, everybody wants to earn more money, but some translators are simply not cut out for the additional investment (in time and energy) that this means. So they’ll listen, make notes and not apply what gets said (often by veering over into “Yes, but…” mode).
No problem.
But others will. Or use input to develop their own approach (why not?). I assume that anyone who does any teaching at all keeps that in mind: students don’t necessarily act on the invaluable new ideas and content they are exposed to (!), at least not immediately.
But if no one offers an alternative to the Big Bad Agencies + Clueless Clients Crushing Helpless Little Translators As Prices Head Inexorably Down Down Down scenario… well, that (inaccurate and very partial) scenario is more likely to gain strength, isn’t it?
That’s what happens in a vacuum, or when people who have developed a business model that works leave the field open to the moaners and groaners. Or simple inertia.
More in a separate post.
“I, too, see many FLers who work with direct clients doing the “price myself a tiny bit lower than agencies” run. It’s curious, isn’t it. Ultimately it means they are only partially convinced of the value of their services, since they are still letting perceived “big guys” (whom they often quite rightly criticize) set the standard.”
I think that this is a realistic strategy. At least it works in my field.
Every week, potential clients who find my website send me a few e-mails with attached Japanese and German patents for a price quote. Some I ignore, but when I prepare my quote for the rest of them (law firms), I am pricing myself a couple of cents below what I think large agencies would charge. I always give them two prices, one for rush and one for non-rush. My non-rush price is probably lower than what an agency working with an experienced translator would have to charge, my rush rate is about the same. Every year my portfolio of repeat clients grows in this manner.
You have to remember that in most cases the law firm first has to run the price by their client.The law firm does not really care too much about the price, they mostly care about the quality. But the end-client who pays the bill does care about the price, especially if we are talking many thousands of dollars.
Things may be different in your market, where you get to hold your client’s little hand and ask them in a hushed voice whether they lost some weight before you quote your price.
In my field, it’s a dog-eat-dog world and you have to be very careful about the price because before you find a new client, your bid is usually just one of many submitted from several sources.
I sure am convinced of the value of my services. But I also know how capitalism works. The business world of this mad patent translator is pure capitalism. It may be one of the few areas where capitalism still works in this country.
Chris: I think that “nano” gives the wrong impression: these aren’t necesarily tiny markets at all. The German/English/German market for financial and corporate reporting, for example, is worth at least a couple of hundred million euros a year, which isn’t exactly “nano”, I think.
If freelances want to offer translations at the same price as we do, then they’re going to have to offer the same service level as we do, which is simply not possible for a solo freelance. They’re going to have to pay somebody else (with at least equal expertise) to revise/QA their text, and they’re going to have to factor in the expense of customer acquisition and retention (project management, customer handholding, etc.). And they’ll also need the flexibility that comes from the greater economy of scale we can leverage. After deducting their cost of sales (revision/QA) and their SGA expenses (acquisition, PM, customer handholding, etc.), their net is going to be no more than if they work for us (and quite possibly less). And please consider the fact that we pay our freelances as much as, and sometimes more, the prices that many agencies charge to the *end customer*!
I think we should abandon this fixation on unit prices and take a more holistic view, based on the individual translator’s productivity – this is also behind our own move towards hourly-based pricing for a growing proportion of our work (currently about half of our work is based on hourly pricing or hourly-based internal costing). For example, if a translator can comfortably (and expertly) translate 4,000 words a day of technical financial texts at 20 cents a word, the end result is the same as somebody translating “fluffy” financial text (communication, strategy, that sort of thing) at 40 cents a word.
It may well be the case that the market segment in question simply will not accept technical financial translations at 40 cents a word (and certainly not from a solo freelance), but the translator can certainly work on upping the price towards, say, 30 cents a word, **provided that the value proposition supports the higher price**. In other words, the translator can only charge a higher price if their expertise and service level justify that price. Expertise and service level are also cost factors (you can’t get something for nothing), so the translator has to be careful that the higher top line doesn’t result in a lower bottom line.
So I’d urge us all to get away from the focus on unit pricing, which I think can be extremely misleading, and more towards what translators can realistically generate in terms of income (basically, EBIT). Another reason is that, in many cases today, unit-based prices are dictated by agencies, rather than being driven by the translator’s own productivity potential. I’ll discuss domain expertise and what I think can be done to improve it in a separate posting later today or tomorrow.
[...] guide to payment levels for freelance [...]
Steve,
“I can’t figure out the difference between European and American taxes. I have never seen an honest, side by side comparison of all US and European taxes in US press. I think that they can’t publish it because it would be really explosive information.”
I think that an interesting comparison (albeit only about corporate taxes) can be drawn from the data published by “DoingBusiness.org”: http://www.doingbusiness.org/data/exploretopics/paying-taxes
If you drill down to the individual countries, you can find some rather interesting information.
Even more interesting are some of the other tables – such as those on the times needed to enforce a contract.
One can easily see, for example, how badly Italy is really doing, and how the United States are far from the top in certain important categories (such as taxation)
It is an interesting comparison but corporate taxes are essentially irrelevant to what I am looking for, in particular since corporations can easily avoid having to pay any corporate taxes (which are nominally high in United States) by incorporating (renting a mailbox) in Cayman Islands and then nominally reinvesting profits abroad. I understand that many if not most major American corporations use this loophole to legally avoid taxation that was created for them by “our representatives”. So much for their patriotism – and I mean both the corporations and “our representatives”. Freelance translators do not have this option.
I would like to see a side by side comparison of taxes, for instance in a country like Germany or France with USA, that would also include a comparison of VAT taxes there and sales taxes here, all state and federal taxes, real estate taxes, payments which are covered in some countries but not here by income taxes, such as medical insurance and medical bills which bankrupt hundreds of thousands of people even though they “have insurance”.
For example, one Czech commenter on this blog said that her tax amounts to about 15% of her income. I don’t know if it’s true but I do know that freelance translators pay several times that much here if you include social security (which is for some reason not called tax here), state taxes, etc. Remember what Warren Buffet said about how much he was paying and how much his secretary was paying in corporate taxes? Was he just deluded or was he right? I think he knows what he’s talking about. Plus as I said, my real taxes are about 100 times higher here than those of a friend of mine who lives in Czech Republic who is also an independent contractor.
Is there a meaningful comparison of taxation of this kind available on the Internet? I do know it’s not available in our corporate media.
[...] it seems that something about money and income always hits people’s urge to discuss! At 65 comments and counting, “How much do [...]
I like your article and I think it is more realistic than Gov. report and closer to our real lives. Hope everyone in the industry gets paid well!
re: tax comparisons (at risk of veering a little OT) – an exercise fraught with difficulty, IMHO. Obviously the possibilities are technically finite, so it ought to feasible, but who would have the time? It would certainly be impossible to produce a simple comparison of gross->net for a given income (or set of incomes) for a few countries, because different tax systems take so many variables into account.
At the very least, for instance, if you included the UK in your comparison, you would have to have different comparison tables for, say:
- age
- married vs single
- number of children and ages
- property size/value & number of people living in it
- how the income is earned
and that is just a short list of some factors I know about that affect the overall tax burden here in jolly old Blighty.
And that ignores any health insurance and pension provision, which varies wildly from country to country but would surely be included in this chart, as a deduction from earnings?
And when it comes to being a FL, it seems there is considerable worldwide variety in the type of expense allowable before tax is applied on the remaining business income. To say nothing of different tax treatment for different legal structures.
So I think any easy-to-read “Country A: gross income X = net income Y” type of chart will be a long time coming…
Now I’ve typed all that, I’ve realised this thread has contributions from people who’ve probably forgotten more about tax than I’ll ever know, but I felt a response was needed as the point was raised more than once. Forgive the intrusion.
@Charlie Bavington
I don’t think it is as complicated as you make it out to be.
On the other hand, as Albert Einstein said:”Everything should be made as simple as possible, BUT NOT TOO SIMPLE!!!
[...] à ce billet très intéressant sur le blog de Corinne McKay j’avais envie de parler de la notion de service dans notre métier. Je reste convaincue [...]
Wow, dear Corinne, this has to be the most popular blog post in the history of translation blogging! Very thoughtful, thorough post, as usual. As you know, we are doing quite well for ourselves and work exclusively with direct clients, but also work a lot (and we like it, plus we have no kids). There are so many points that you touch on, and I agree with all of them and have some insight — but for now (busy with a project), I’ll say that we feel well-compensated for our work.
…and with that, we are at 72 comments. Incredible –don’t think we’ve ever had more than 15 or so on our blog. Keep up the fantastic work. Ah, just ordered your book for a friend in Argentina.
Wow what an excellent post, and of course a spot on topic – hence such a popularity! Brilliant discussion as well.
I agree with Kevin who favours small agencies to the big ones. I think it is perhaps a bit of generalisation to say that they always bad, but they quite often concentrate only on profits and shareholders’ satisfaction, neglecting other stakeholders and therefore their strategy is somehow short-sighted. I do not understand myself, why such companies exist, and why those who agree to work for low rates help them to do so. My only explanation is that low barriers to entry allow anybody who claims to speak two languages (or more) to become a ‘professional’ translator. With no linguistic/writing skills, cultural knowledge and what’s more specialist in-depth knowledge based on a solid education, people like that quite often undertake jobs for lower rates and the results are quite often pathetic. Or perhaps it is only a case for certain translation, I often encounter on line or elsewhere, where economies of scale turned professional services into a commodity?
I am quite satisfied to work with direct clients almost exclusively, but I agree it is hard word and required both business and social skills. Perhaps some of the translators accept lower rates simply because they lack entrepreneurial skills?
Thanks Corinne and all for the discussion on this interesting topic. It give the beginning translators both the range of rates and fantastic scope for benchmarking too:)
I’ve been working for 20 years in the field, and make about 14,000/year US. It’s been enough so far.
Of course, I only work about 6 hours a week. I don’t know how you guys keep up the pace.
‘Thanks for the insightful discussion’ is a pretty weak comment to follow this wealth of thought-provoking insight, but thanks anyway.
Anecdotal backing for one point in the original post: my income did go up after I became ATA certified.
What I think is a more important factor to consider regarding income that hasn’t been mentioned (apologies if I missed it among all the comments) is whether gross income increases annually, absent other factors.
We can compare our absolute incomes, and that may help us understand the potential in our given market as long as we have a good idea of what that market is, but only comparing our own practice year on year will give us a measurable picture of progress or stagnation.
@Acgtranslation
In my experience, large agencies are always bad. Always. Can you name one that isn’t?
Some small agencies are can be pretty nasty too, but they are not that way by design, they just happen to be run by mean people who are not particularly bright.
Large agencies are a typical product of what I call gangster capitalism, which is a system that cares about one thing and one thing only – money. It is run by greed and it runs on greed. It cares about nothing except profit. As I put it in one of my blogs a while ago, Fiat Pecunia, Pereat Mundus! (Let me make my money now, to hell with the world!).
Most small agencies still operate based on the principles of mom-and-pop capitalism, which is a rational type of capitalism. They are run by real people who care about real people. Most people leaving comments on this blog, (thank you so much, Corinne, I hope we are not gonna get you into trouble), are to some degree or other a small agency, including this mad patent translator.
When small agencies are bought out by large ones, they automatically become “bad” within a couple of months. I’ve seen it more than once.
Anyone knows a “good big agency”, one that pays good rates, on time, and that does not force translators to sign demeaning contracts, or does not ask for impossible deadlines all the time, etc., and so on, and so forth?
I can’t think of even one exception to the rule (which is copied from Orwell, of course): small is gooood, big is baaaad.
I’m looking for a patent translator for two patent filings: English to Chinese, to Japanese, and to Russia/Ukraine. An anyone make recommendations please? I’ve worked through foreign counsel in the past, and now I’m hit with a number of national-phase filing deadlines that are spiking costs for my company. Looking for high quality work at a lower price than I’m being quoted.
Thank you. Sorry for this post not being completely relevant to the thread.
Robert
Sorry, didn’t leave my email in the previous post, for those who would apply or can make referrals or suggestions:
rjfeeney at vergence-ent dot com
Thank you,
Robert
@Robert: indeed, this is not really the best place for your query. And/but it reminds me of an article on translation that dates back some time (NB « Flefo » was one of the only virtual watering holes for translators in those days):
« On New Year’s Day [….], Eugene Seidel, a FLEFO member based in Frankfurt, posted his tongue-in-cheek projections for the year ahead. It was a witty message, including one entry: “November 10: a client enters the forum; his skull is later found on a mountain top.”
Mr. Seidel was referring to the fact that many translators have little or no contact with the users of their texts, so when the opportunity does arise, they often come across as extraordinarily aggressive – or absurdly meek and humble. »
I realize you are a busy CEO, but would be curious to know whether any translators contacted you to discuss your translation needs after your brief post here. And if so, how they pitched their services (especially given that you led with a comment indicating you were price-driven).
No one replied. Hoping to keep my skull off of the mountaintop.
This blog post and the comments are fascinating and have me left speechless. I am only starting out as a freelance translator and I signed up on Freelancer.com. The usual rate at which translation projects from English to German and vice versa are won there is $20/1000 or less. So I am completely baffled by the prices quoted here; I know some of it can be explained by experience and specialization, but how are 20x as much possible? And most importantly: where to find these clients where supply and demand rules don’t seem to exist?
@Kyle,
I’d start by registering on translation-specific sites, e.g. ProZ, GoTranslators. Though many of us professionals consider those a lower end of the market, you can earn several times what you’re quoting for freelancer.com from jobs posted there (caveat – I don’t work with German).
Karen
@Steve
“I can’t think of even one exception to the rule (which is copied from Orwell, of course): small is gooood, big is baaaad.” I like this one. It is the experience I’ve made, too.
I was registered at a translation portal from 2005 to 2008. In the first 2 years, there came 2 end clients and 7 smaller agencies paying decently. They stay till today and some of them have raised my rate several times.
Since 2007, I could only receive e-mails of cattle calls at that portal. So, I went to Europe visiting potential clients (smaller agencies and translation departments of multinational concerns) several times in 2008 and 2010. I am pretty satisfied with the results. For some of those clients, I arrange even onsite taskforces along side translation jobs.
As you wrote, “They are run by real people who care about real people.” And I don’t think it would bring me any trouble admitting that I am a small agency, a freelancer who work with some other freelancers for some Asian languages on different subject matters. My clients (mostly German speaking once) know it from the very beginning.
[...] yourself, find financially rewarding jobs and put in the hours. Corinne McKay wrote a great follow-up to her original ‘six-figure’ article. You’ll find plenty of information on how [...]
I am completely agree with all the comments, its really a fascinating subject to talk about. However, it has been really hard to position new or beginner translators in US. After the past few months, nobody is hiring; How can I position better in the translators market, having a 2 year of translating experience abroad? I would really appreciate your help.
@Joanna
The ATA is very frustrating to me. I am confident that I could pass their test, but they won’t even let me take it without at least two years of verifiable full-time experience. Because I am not certified, though, I am hesitant to try to become a full-time translator.
I bumped into your blog through Google. Thanks so much for writing about the perks and challanges of translation! I am just starting to be a freelance translator (part-time) and was looking for helpful and practical advice. I look forward to reading more!
[...] NHS Today (And Why You Should)This American’s Experience of Britain’s Healthcare SystemHow much do freelance translators earn? Is it enough? .broken_link, a.broken_link { text-decoration: line-through; [...]
[...] field is interesting, international, and offers competitive pay. According to Corinne McKay, the average certified translator makes approximately $71,000 annually and non-certified [...]