When I first began commercial translation work nearly 25 years ago, the markets were not far along the transition from largely local sourcing to international service provision via the Internet. A mere five years or so before, while still living in the US, my ex-wife had tried to get remote work as a translator with an agency located in another state, several agencies in fact, and this proved impossible. There was simply no trust that the work relationship could function without physical proximity.
And in those early days on the WWW frontier, pioneers encountered strange customs in other lands when it came time to trade. Those odd foreigners seemed loathe to accept real money and expected quotations in their own, strange currencies, and to make it all worse, they described the text qualities to be dealt with in strange, local units beyond the ken of civilized men.
And even when the units seemed familiar, often they were not. What’s a page? A physical space of some dimensions, bearing words? A standard number of words, or characters perhaps, reflecting a presumed average in a given typeface and point size? And why did translation customers from different sectors in the same country use different unit quantities or counting methods? Should spaces be included in character counts? And are we counting the source text, or as was often the case, the translated text? Grande confusão for many.
To add to the confusion, the marketing weasels of Trados GmbH introduced a new concept: the dubious proposition that discounts should be applied when texts were translated which bore similarities to past texts translated. Translators sitting in on early presentations of Trados workspace tools for translation were baffled to hear how “they” offered rate reductions at the sentence level if a certain percentage of words were the same as some sentence translated last year. And equally baffled to hear how identical sentences would never have to be translated again. What about context? they said. What about register? they asked. What about the evolution of language? (a point well made as I look back on my sadly dated translations of software manuals from more than twenty years ago).
But that leaky ship sailed, bearing its cargo of diseased costing practices to ports far and wide abroad, and in time, as the natives died off in consequence of these intercultural encounters, trashlation empires were built with more uniform policies of payment to external service providers and sometimes for local customers.
“By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain.
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.”
— Rudyard Kipling
And to cope with the great overheads of administering such empires, new taxes discount schemes were imposed on the gratefully laboring natives, in some cases with retrospective algorithmic determination of “effort” after the work was completed. The whole notion of work all day fer the sugar in yer tay became aspirational for many, as night was added to their shifts to make ends meet.
Mindset and manifestation of success are the mantras for many to make money in today’s slavelancer market for trashlation. These often seem to me to be the worst synthesis of magical thinking and toxic Protestant ethic nonsense. You can’t eat mindset, though I’ve been tempted to suggest that those promoting it so assiduously eat me.
Words are commodities. Not even dead lightning bugs for many these days but more akin to loads of recycling waste sent off for NMT and LLM and MOUSE processing in distant sweatshops and digitally nomadic hovels.
What is the value of words when so many argue that translation should be free or nearly so, a subscribed utility like one’s connection to the sewer system? So much of the conversation around service pricing focuses on the units of exchange as text rather than value of the transformation process of language and culture, or at least the time of qualified professionals to render said text into a suitable form to achieve one’s communication goals.
Nonetheless, in all the abusive confusion of today’s costing and payment shell games, some need to understand the others’ pricing models persists. It’s hard to negotiate or to achieve mutually satisfactory compensation arrangements when each party in the conversation has its own way of expressing work quantities and value.
A number of technical tools exist to address this need, and in some cases these can be extended easily to cover other, unanticipated cases. But as we engage in such calculatory wizardry, I do think it is important to remember the true levels of expertise required and the fair social market value of such expertise. And averages ought not to apply when one is looking for exceptional results. The value and risks of outcomes matter.
For many years now, Alessandra Muzzi has provided some web pages and a calculation tool using Microsoft Excel to help people determine equivalent rates between different methods (source vs. target) and units of calculation.
I extended that concept years ago, first to account for discount rates imposed or offered in a way that enables one to achieve an overall desired compensation by countering the effects of discounts:
That spreadsheet can be downloaded here and adapted for your needs.
Next I made another simulator for myself to look at past projects in various categories to determine whether their counts of words per line, page, etc. differed greatly and how much time on average per unit certain types of text were taking me, and what my earning per hour were:
It’s extremely helpful to know, regardless of the costing method applied, how much one is making per hour of effort, and this spreadsheet was a great help for me to understand the equivalent rates for different methods of costing as an aid in negotiation. You can take a copy of that spreadsheet yourself and adapt it for your own purposes.
I’m not going to explain all the details of how to use those spreadsheets here, though I’ll certainly answer questions in the comments or private messages. These were tools developed long ago for myself and a group of colleagues and agency clients I often helped with job costing for end customers, and they reflect the particular circumstances and needs of that group. However, both tools should be easily adaptable to your situation and should help you better understand the implications of the real rates (at whatever scales may apply) you accept for projects.
I’m also not going to go into the usual spiel about how to determine the rates one “should” be charging for projects. So many factors go into such determinations, and if you aren’t able to figure that out, dozens of guides to assist you can be found without much ado. The hard part in many cases is simply understanding someone else’s methods of costing in terms that are familiar to you, and it is to help you frame that question effectively that I have provided the examples above.