Translation rates per word count in the United States.
Thread poster: Miguel E. García
Miguel E. García
Miguel E. García
United States
Local time: 06:53
English to Spanish
+ ...
May 19, 2020

Hello Colleagues,

I'm trying to get familiar with translation rates ENG-SPA in the United States. Does anyone have a table or some ideas about the translation rates depending on word count? For example, what's the rate for 1-1000 words, rate for 1001-5000, rate 10000+. Any information you can share, it will be greatly appreciate it.

Thank you very much,

MG


 
Liviu-Lee Roth
Liviu-Lee Roth
United States
Local time: 08:53
Romanian to English
+ ...
I translate only EN-RO-EN May 19, 2020

In my case, the rate stays the same no matter the number; 200 or 50,000 the rate/word is the same.

Yolanda Broad
Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida
Philippe Etienne
Katya Kesten
 
Miguel E. García
Miguel E. García
United States
Local time: 06:53
English to Spanish
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Thank you! May 19, 2020

Thank you for response Liviu. Have you had any clients asking for a lower rate for higher volume projects? If so, do you just tell them that your rate stays the same?

 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 13:53
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
@Miguel May 19, 2020

Miguel E. García wrote:
I'm trying to get familiar with translation rates ... in the United States. What's the rate for 1-1000 words, rate for 1001-5000, etc.


Agencies often accept that you will charge a minimum fee for small jobs. This means that any job of fewer than, say, 250 words are charged at your usual rate for 250 words. Or, it means that any job that takes less than 1 hour is charged at your usual hourly rate.

Clients will often ask for "volume discounts", but it makes no sense to accept requests for volume discounts. Your per-word rate should be the same for 1000 words, 10 000 words and 100 000 words. That said, if you believe that the higher volume will result in you working faster, then you should feel free to pass on some of the savings to the client. But it won't be more than 10-20%.

A different type of discount are fuzzy match discounts, or discounts for repeating sentences. This is quite common and broadly accepted by both agencies and translators. If you're a new translator, fuzzy matches won't really save you time, but try it. If you're an established translator, only accept requests for fuzzy match discounts if the fuzzy matches actually make you work faster.

Of course, if you know that work is going to be thin on the ground, feel free to accept/offer a lower rate. But if you have no lack of work, a systematic volume discount is silly.


[Edited at 2020-05-19 21:06 GMT]


Yolanda Broad
Kay-Viktor Stegemann
Liviu-Lee Roth
Philip Lees
Dan Lucas
Sheila Wilson
Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida
 
Miguel E. García
Miguel E. García
United States
Local time: 06:53
English to Spanish
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Thank you! May 19, 2020

Thank you Samuel. That's great information, and it totally makes sense. I really appreciate your response.

 
Liviu-Lee Roth
Liviu-Lee Roth
United States
Local time: 08:53
Romanian to English
+ ...
Hi Miguel, May 20, 2020

Miguel E. García wrote:

Thank you for response Liviu. Have you had any clients asking for a lower rate for higher volume projects? If so, do you just tell them that your rate stays the same?



I work for agencies (LSP) that have contracts with the US.Government and for the last ten years my rates/word have been the same no matter the volume. Just three weeks ago, one of the LSPs increased my rate by $.01 (hahaha!) but considering that their volume is large it is OK, it adds up.
Otherwise, Samuel hit the nail on the head!

Good luck,
lee


Tan Nguyen
 
Sheila Wilson
Sheila Wilson  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 12:53
Member (2007)
English
+ ...
See the tools here May 20, 2020

There are two tools on this site that should help you. One helps you to calculate what you need to earn. Remember that what we're actually selling is our time, and our time is worth more than a burger-flipper's time because we have skills the client needs. Once we know how much we need to earn in an hour (remembering that we'll have hours of admin, marketing etc that won't be paid for by any one client), then we can calculate all other charging methods, by timing ourselves doing some translatin... See more
There are two tools on this site that should help you. One helps you to calculate what you need to earn. Remember that what we're actually selling is our time, and our time is worth more than a burger-flipper's time because we have skills the client needs. Once we know how much we need to earn in an hour (remembering that we'll have hours of admin, marketing etc that won't be paid for by any one client), then we can calculate all other charging methods, by timing ourselves doing some translating, editing, transcription, subtitling...

The other is called "community rates" and it uses all our declared rates to statistically generate averages per pair. Don't take it as "the" market rate, but it can be a useful indicator.

Lastly, be prepared to say "no" often -- that's particularly necessary in your pair. There are many different markets out there. Although you might be prepared to do a few jobs for low rates at the start, if you get sucked into working full-time for low-paying agencies, you'll be so busy working all hours of the day to scrape a living that you won't have time to market your services to better clients. You'll have put your business into a downward spiral . So aim for the quality part of the market, and aim to become a specialist rather than staying a generalist.

Oh, and volume discounts, as others have said, rarely make sense. Consistency becomes more of a problem with many long texts, unless they're very structured and you're using a CAT tool. If you do agree to one for any reason, make sure you only start applying it when you've actually received a high volume of words as "long-term jobs" have a habit of disappearing.
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Translation rates per word count in the United States.







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