Don't Have Company Culture/Mission/Processes/Whatever? Generate It.

A while ago Marta wrote a post on her Business School blog asking readers' opinion on whether looking at your translation practice through a process perspective, as a solo practitioner, was a little over the top or still within the bonds.

The lazy conformist in me is inclined to say yes. However, intellectually, I know the answer is more along the lines of: 'why the heck not if that works for you?'

See, in matters that are not somehow moral in nature, it all comes down to whether something works for you or not. That's the pragmatic criterion and only one that really counts in such cases.

On the other hand, being pragmatic doesn't have to mean being a passive, defeatist, complaining lazy person.

Would you call Alexander the Great a dreamer? He had a dream, but… — You get my point.

I've also recently had a nice conversation with the young owner of a small construction company, whom I was mentoring a bit on some business and legal matters (he obviously knew how to do and manage his own work). We realized that being a freelancer was not that much different from running a small company.

With a bit of simplification, on some level it only came down to not having a couple of people to delegate some specific tasks to and then manage and supervise them and register them with the authorities for tax and insurance purposes.

… But picking up calls and dealing with stuff and soldiering on from one month to the next and hopefully landing nicer deals sometime as you grow was pretty much the same on a very basic level.

After eight paragraphs already this finally gets us to the main point: nobody says you can't have your own processes, even if you, yourself are the only person executing them, or your company culture or mission. Even if there is no company — for example because freelancers don't need to be sole-props in your country — there is a still a practice, like a doctor's or lawyer' practice, which is predicated on you being someone with some professional activity if not exactly a business. And that's practically the same for practical purposes.

So nobody says you can't write down a vision — and if someone does actually say that, you don't need to listen. Just go ahead and write it. Consider putting it on your own website. And, for the record, such ideas actually sell more easily than simple products or services. Products and services may be more practical, but it actually is easier to get people hooked on ideas or relate ideas than products or services. Watch this presentation from Marta — which is what made me start thinking about all these things several years ago — to see why.

Can Printed Letters Get You More Clients?

The immediate inspiration came from the title of an e-mail from Jon Jantsch's Duct Tape Marketing: Can Handwritten Letters Get You More Clients, referring to a post by Nick Gibson at Six Revisions.

However, a few days ago I'd read a couple of articles about typography for lawyers. There is even a website titled just that, by Matthew Butterick, a font designer turned lawyer, I kid thee not.

Between those two, a realization struck me immediately (well, almost; I was a bit low on caffeine, which I'm remedying right now):

Ekhm, ignore handwriting for now, through I'm positively sure — and without needing to see any tangible proof to boot — that it would get you more clients or 'better' ones.

Rather, before we even look that far, there are still printed letters.

See, on your website and in PDF brochures you're limited by whatever fonts the reader has, not you.

Depending on who you work for, that may be less of a problem — I've once seen a web designer use Caslon of all things, because his readers could mostly be presumed to already have it on their systems anyway (it's an Adobe font that comes with Photoshop). Similarly, most institutional clients probably have MS Office, so most of them would see them if you defined them in the CSS sheet, perhaps with Georgia, Palatino or even Times as a fallback from among the sixteen or so mostly stable set of (relatively) 'web-safe fonts'. (For server-side hosting, embedding fonts in PDFs and other forms of what effectively is font distrubution you'd need a suitable licence from the copyright owner.)

But, on paper, your options are not limited in that way. You have more control. Paper is paper, it doesn't matter what type of hardware or software platform the reader runs. What's best, once printed, it always stays the way it is, for everyone.

Naturally, the visual impression is not the same for everyone, but that's something for you to figure out. The point is, you can do a lot in terms of advanced typography on paper these days, even with the same old MS Office (well, not too old, say: 2013) that everybody else has and to some extent possibly even in Open/Libre Office.

Tracking, leading, kerning, ligatures, widows and orphans and off-black shades, different fonts for headers than for the main body of the document, you name it, it's there. You can also hand-pick just the right paper and envelope and not skimp on the ink or toner since you're probably going to be printing just one or two pages.

You can make it look very, very good, without at the same time making it look over the top — although striking the right balance may, naturally, require some practice and will always be at least a little on the subjective side, just like font pairing (google it).

Of course, use a fountain pen for signatures and any handwritten additions (depending on your demographic, it may be more courteous to write greetings and salutations in hand, and the courtesy might not be lost on the recipient).

Naturally, this is even more important for anyone who does certified translation or anything else that requires hard copy.

What else? Years ago e-mail was exceptional because it was hi-tech. These days, however, paper mail is already exceptional — and thus both special and upscale — in many corporate environments. It's something to put your hands on, to touch, to tear your eyes off of the monitor screen and read like in old times.

Some clients may find it superfluous or pretentious, or both, but others will perceive it as a welcome sign of reliability, seriousness, permanence, stable foundation, a sign that you aren't going to disappear overnight like an e-scammer. Sort of like what still having landline came to mean, at least before the fake kind became popular.

Not a Reverse Auction: Follow-Up

Remember my very last post: The Market Is Not a Reverse Auction?

Whether you do or not, please allow me to give you a short recap:

Whatever one can say about the translation market in general, your part of it does not have to be the sum total of a bajillion outright auctions for the lowest bidder or recruitments based on 'best rates'.

You don't have to attune yourself to the market and passively obey the general trend, let alone go out of your way to adapt and fit in.

To adapt and fight is an option too.

Being active, making proposals, persuading, insisting, suggesting trade-offs, even declining unprofitable offers — is not something only clients and agencies can do.

You have as good a right to try and change the rules of the game as they do.

The Market Is Not a Reverse Auction

You've probably heard a lot — including from me — about how prices are falling, status is falling, respect is declining, all of which is true, and allow which keeps intensifying as we speak.

But this isn't the whole truth. Things don't have to be this way.

You may've heard from so called business experts and frontline fighters about how this is what the clients want and how we must provide. Suck it up and deliver. Like the tough guys we are. Or they are. Bullshit. Stupid, ridiculous bullshit.

They make it sound like being a tough guy is about putting up a brave face as you cough up protection money for a guy who certainly is bigger than you but not nearly big enough, or relevant enough, to shove you around at will. How tough indeed!

No matter how distorted and unbalanced, there is still symmetry in the market. You don't have to do whatever you sense — or, more likely, are told by pundits and sometimes even your own client — 'the market' wants. Meaning what the buyers want.

… This is because 'the market' ≠ the buyers. The market is also the sellers. It's a two-way street.

There is no 'new reality of the market' that buyers supposedly now want more goods or better goods for the same or lower price, which they supposedly didn't already want before. Any guy who says that certainly is so no prize-winning material. There is nothing remotely inventine or innovative about that kind of statement. Buyers have always wanted to buy more for less and sellers have always wanted to sell less for more. Everybody has always wanted to make a good bargain. Nothing new there.

Now, even supposing that you're going to deliver that good bargain as opposed to sticking to your guns and negotiating harder, even that still doesn't mean you need to start selling more for less. Because you don't.

On the contrary: You can explain how what you already are selling, at the price you already are charging, is a great bargain and always has been. (Just perhaps there was no pressing need to go into the details of it until now.)

As a translator you are opening doors that would otherwise be closed and building bridges where people would otherwise need boats, or at least building and navigating those boats for them so they don't have to swim. Those doors and bridges and boats lead to potentially unlimited opportunities, which, while probably finite, are still worth times and times more than the price of your translation calculated as the number of words times the per-word rate.

It's only that as times get worse and competition gets tougher and scarier there may be more storytelling for you to do before the story falls in together and sells. But, unless you're translating contracts and marketing blurbs written anew at each time for every $100-$1000 transaction, you should still have more than enough wiggle room to carve out a decent fee, if you're willing to put some work in it.

And before you put in the work you must realize and accept that the work can be done and will make a difference. At least try.

***

Consider that a lot of the information you have comes from (i) battle-scared warriors who want to appear tough as they make the brave decision to give the opponent what he wants without putting up a fight and still hope to get the hero treatment; and (ii) people who have a vested interest in making you think that you already are buried neck-deep in reverse auctions, sucked in and unable to go anywhere else. Which you aren't. Not remotely. Not even if your situation actually is somewhat bad in objective terms. It just isn't as bad as that.

Consider how many times they have:

• asked if you are available
• stressed that it's important it's you who take up that project
• tried to evoke your sympathy
• … or threatened you
• or resorted to flattery
• or even made small concessions such as waiting their turn or paying a slightly higher rate

Boy! (Of either sex.) All of that means you do have some pull.

It's just that the opposing side of the negotiation table may want to prevent you from actually using that pull, for example by making you believe you don't have it or shouldn't use it because it would somehow be unethical. (Or, most frequently, because their procedures, same for every contractor, don't leave room for it.)

See, contrary to what they would like you to believe, the market doesn't consist of millions of sellers, trying to win the favour of buyers who are free to pick and fuss all they want, pretty much because that's they way of things, which is how it should be and the only way it could be. Nope, it isn't.

All of those buyers also need to contend with the scarcity of the goods or services they want to buy, or even of the sellers who sell those, as well as the higher or lower attractiveness of their, the buyer's, budgets and other terms they are able or willing to offer. There is nothing which prevents sellers from selling to someone who offers a higher price or is willing to wait longer or sweeten the deal in some other way.

The market is more of a free-for-all. Everybody is auctioning. Everybody is competing for the other party's side of the bargain. There are elements of reverse auction and there are  — or at least could be, if translators or any type of sellers were more proactive — elements of normal, straight auction as well, where the highest bidder among the buyers and not the lowest bidder among the sellers wins. There are no formalized bids or rules to cover the entire market as a whole, and you need to play it by ear and by trial and error and by guessing a lot. But the essential mechanics are there.

***

Try to break out of the psychological compulsion to please the client (or else!), at least for the sake of a little exercise we're going to have.

Suppose there is a job you don't to do or in any case can afford to 'lose', i.e. simply not get, which is not the end of the world. You won't actually 'lose' it if you don't get it and it was never years. You will simply not have got that one particular job, and that's it. For the record, you don't need to get everything single job you see, nor could you humanly process them all anyway. What you need to get is enough jobs to make a comfortable living at the rates you charge.

So, take that problem job and try to up the rate or move the deadline. Be fair, don't shortchange them, just don't be as acommodating as before. Mind your need for sleep and free time, or give yourself an 8-hour day, 40-hour week, occasional holidays, you get the point. Or, if they're a new client and you know they have the money, then don't charge them the same rate you've been charging everybody for years on years now for the same work — raise it in due proportion to your increasing experience. And inflation. And everything else.

In other words, stop giving so much **** about 'being competitive'. Allow yourself to be less competitive. In the meaning they attach to it anyway.

(Remember that, in the real world, you're competitive or not depending on whether you win the competition. Not depending on whether someone says you are.)

There is a good chance you will get those higher rates and longer deadlines, if you actually try. You should try, if only to know more or less where you stand. And remember that you can always grant a discount on the invoice or deliver early or even agree to grant them a one-off discount if you become convinced that their reasons are sound, that their cause is a legitimate one.

Most people who will turn tail and pass up on you are going to be those on the lookout for a cheaper provider, not really the few people who have a real need but too much pride to ask for a discount (hint: if their statements are public record and they've been awarding juicy bonuses to their management, they are not in dire need), so don't worry too much about that. You can still make it clear (somewhere, somehow), that discretionary reductions and otherwise unique terms are available on a case-by-case basis to clients who can show a legitimate need without being able to pay the normal fee. That will keep the needy in and the bargain seekers out.

***

What else can you do?

Yeah, it's not all wrestling about the fees. Supply and demand can be influenced — or brought out — in subtler ways that don't involve violence.

I say 'brought out' because the advantages of what you already provide — the good features and the useful benefits of it — are often hidden and underappreciated, and it's up to you to change that state of things as opposed to simply heaping even more at an even lower price.

Thus you may need to do more work to make sure that clients realize just how much they're getting from you — or how much more they're getting from you than from someone else.

Many of them will still try to get it cheaper, that's sort of how human nature is, at least for some humans. The trick is to not cave in the moment they say that (to try costs them nothing, so in a certain sense they would be stupid if they didn't), but instead reiterate the value that you provide and the fact that your prices are already quite reasonable and (if true) that many other clients are perfectly willing to pay them (which means they see the value).

A client who already sees he's getting a good bargain but would like to turn it into an even better one doesn't have too many strong arguments to show for it, and chances are that if things were to resort to open violence you would come out on the top. Especially if he already is getting better terms from you than anyone else is giving. There is an old Latin saying: quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur. If someone asserts something without proof, you don't need proof to negate it. You just negate it.

Remember that in such situations the burden is on them to convince you. You discharge your own burden by simply quoting a fee that falls within the market standard or as much higher than it as your qualifications are or the difficulty of the job is. Anything more favourable to the client is for the client to justify, and you have no obligation to give him an A for effort.

***

To prove your qualifications, data in on objective, legible and concise format are always good. Just pile up the degrees and accreditations and certificates and years of experience and testimonials from happy clients (both the content and the sheer number matters). That is something your client cannot claim to disbelieve or challenge without a good foundation.

Also include samples so that you can refer your prospects to them instead of translating something new for them free of charge for their proofreader's reviewing pleasure.

Speaking of which, obviously, just about any random QA'er from a translation agency or business company is not going to test you more reliably than your professors at university and your state examiners and exam boards at professional associations already have done, unless the test is more difficult and the reviewer is more qualified than your previous examiners were, which is simply not very likely.

It's only that some of your prospects may prefer to have the privelege of acting unreasonably and disbelieving anything which they haven't personally put their hands on — and very literally so because they won't even accept credible documents from respectable institutions in lieu of a first-hand check. Guess what? You don't really have to put up with that sort of treatment. (Unless you actually have to.)

It's kinda like maths. You don't need to prove that 5000 words times 0.12 a word makes 600 to pay. That's just the kind of thing you just don't have to prove in the face of feigned or even actual disbelief.

But you will still need to use your own good sense to find out where the limits are because making conclusions about your skill level on the basis of your papers is a bit less forward than simple arithmetics. It just isn't some kind of murky waters of non-knowledge and uncertainty that somehow means you should be charging peanuts because your actual qualifications are intangible. And even if they were.

***

Finally, you don't need to talk business. At least not only it and not all the time. I suggest you do read a bunch of course materials about the basics of economy, management and marketing just to know the setting you work in (and if you do business translation, you need that knowledge anyway), but instead of focusing solely on the business terms that are native to your clients, you also use terms that are native to your art.

After all, they need a translator, so it makes no point pretending they don't need one but only have a business problem to solve. Which is not true.

So you don't want to only use some business references that they're going to downplay and counter easily simply because they're more fluent in the lingo and carry more authority in the area than you do. You need to establish yourself as an expert in what you do, which is what they need.

And no bullshit like you still need to prove you're needed. If you weren't needed, they wouldn't be there asking. Or that you need to prove your monetary value. If they didn't sense the value… yes, correct, they wouldn't be there asking (which is even fine to tell them, at least without using the 'BS' word, usually).

So if they know it and you know that they know it and they know that you know they know it, and so on and so forth, then it makes no sense to act like you don't know (and you don't know etc.) and grant them a victory in their own silly game. No unfair downplaying of the importance of your art, and no gratuitous refusals to recognize your qualifications should be your rule no. 1 for them. And yes, you can set rules. To some extent at least. (Precisely to the extent you can get away with, which is up to you to find out.) This remains true even if it's you contacting them rather than the other way round. You're still talking business and fees and not charity and donations.

***

I suggest you also use the talents that you already have to deliver a convincing value proposal that does a good job of showing — and claiming the credit for — the value and meaning (and cost-to-provide and scarcity and difficulty to find) of the services you provide.

Thus, if you are one of those people who came to translation from a different profession, one which is somehow involved in most of the stuff you translate, you could simply use that to establish a connection and to establish your relevance. And show yourself as a competent fellow (of either sex) who understands the stuff.

On the other hand, if you have more of a language background, you should use that. After all, you are an expert on language. So rise and shine. And if your bacgkround is more on the literary side, especially if you know how to write or edit a story, then certainly use that to your advantage. It's actually becoming quite hip in the business world these days.

And, once again, if they gratuitously negate or downplay your importance or relevance, call them on it. Don't be aggressive or rude, but force them to back out of it, if only by asking questions — for example: why they think that, why do they think they know better than a recognized authority — or repeating the obvious — for example just how authoritative the institution is which granted your credentials or was satisfied with your work as your client.

Again, you don't need to act like every shit argument is good currency, because it's not. But you need to build some confidence. I've already suggested expanding your knowledge and re-evaluating your status as an expert in your field with a useful role to play for experts in other fields, but there are also other ways, such as developing your soft skills, including the art of negotiating and saying no without breaking up the negotiation. Everything in due time, not too much at once, but I suggest you take a look at those. I did as an adolescent (a bit overeager to please and a bit shy to stand up, a bit inept at defending my right to stand up and reasons for it etc.), and it did me some good. It prepared me for some things later on.

The no. 1 realization to make is that there is bullshit in this world and that that bullshit isn't binding on you, you can call people on it and refuse to accept it (as a reason for them to get a discount or otherwise).

And the no. 2 thing to do (more like even no. 1, in fact) is to use your knowledge to demonstrate… your knowledge. And to show in all sorts of ways (not always by talking directly about it) that your services are valuable and that you're a competent provider, and (if you need to) that your fees are reasonable and offer a lot of value.

If you have lawyer clients (small firm or solo), or doctors, or architects, it could be a good idea to ask them for some tips, as they've probably already had to deal with the same problems. There should also be more literature available from lawyers' perspective than translators', nearly all of which is going to be applicable to translators without much adaptation left to do, given how similar the professions and the problems are.

With time, as your means allow it, you will want to use a real marketer and a real ad man to make your message heard, to give it more reach and make it more resounding. The goal is to make your perspective matter too and not only the perspective of people who want your services to be cheap and underappreciated (also because it makes them cheaper).

***

Additional reading:

major auction types at Wiki

I believe the market is closer to Walrasian auction than a reverse auction, but the point is not to analyse the theoretical model of that (which I haven't even done myself), the point is to realize that it all goes two ways.

storytelling

As a (wo)man of letters, you simply have an advantage there, and you should use it. Good marketing kinda always comes down to a good story, especially when it comes to creating a brand.

Walrasian auction and Walras's law

… If you're more mathematically inclined, this may do better than a narrative explanation.

As well as a bunch of how-to books, starting from 'for dummies' and moving up. It's only reasonable to know the setting you're forced to operate in and the setting that's native to your prospective clients. It will help you get better fees and otherwise better terms from them, but it will also help you better serve their own needs, which is a win-win situation. (Just like being a good legal translator helps you identify and refuse to sign, or renegotiate, an abusive clause in a contract.)

On Growing Some Scales

By accident, on Saturday, when alternating between serious reading and just chilling out with a bottle of amber ale after a long, hard week, I found a new marketing blog that seemed worth reading because of its no-nonsense approach with useful ideas, no trumpet-blowing and no padding. One of the first to capture my attention was a guest post by a young copywriter called Stephanie O'Brien, titled thus: Why Athletes Get Paid More Than You And How to Steal Their Strategies (and nothing less).

It'll be easier if you read it before we go on. Don't worry, it's short. Shorter than the economy reading that might be in order later.

In short, she describes it from a marketing point of view, but what she's talking about is the economies of scale (if you're German or Polish, you be thinking of it as 'effect of scale').

In some lines of business, the larger your operations are, the lower the costs of an individual operation or individual product or service can be. This is used by companies that compete on the price, often to the detriment of quality. Translation agencies can benefit from it, processing millions of orders in all sorts of languages and fields, while translators can't really, because they only have this much time to sell.

Or can they?

This is the question.

After all, athletes — and singers, and actors, and authors — are also time-limited, just like anyone else who essentially is selling his own time.

We can only earn this much when getting paid by a couple of agencies or a couple of direct clients, or a mix of both.

Seemingly. Because the larger picture is that:

1. Our work is still used by more people than just the one person signing the PO. Only perhaps we no longer own the translation in any way after completing and returning it and cashing in the fees. But it's still out there, getting read by many people — who often rely on it in their own work for even more people — and the one guy who procured it certainly didn't make it. His company didn't translate, either.
2. In a direct sense, athletes, singers, actors etc. still get most of their income from a handful of sources, they aren't having millions of invoices paid directly by crowds of fans. Even if they had an arrangement in places that gives them a certain percentage of every sale of something (e.g. a ticker or a copy), that money still comes from one source.

Thus, the difference is rather that they get credited for serving the masses and we don't. That part is monopolized by middlemen — agencies — and, to some extent, clients themselves. By clients themselves I mean people who act like the author who doesn't want the translator's name in the credits (it usually doesn't make it to the cover, anyway).

But imagine middlemen in sports and music trying to act like they — their companies, rather — are kicking the ball. It ain't gonna fly. But in translation it's quite viable.

(Lawyers are somewhere in the middle. The firms control the cake, but the names and faces of the individual lawyers are indispensable to the system, at least the way it is now. To some extent the same is true of sworn translators and other translators whose names must appear on the documents.)

In the end result, we aren't getting any sort of commission fees. Rather, the guys between us and the reader reduce us to the role of a wage earner, whose typically doesn't even reflect the scale of the enterprise. This is cool and dandy when our per-word or per-page fees multiplied by the number of such units add up to like one third of the transaction's worth, but not so cool when, let's say, the realtors and the lawyers are getting a percentage cut out of a couple million bucks, while the translators will have to content themselves with, say, a couple thousand words times a dozen cents per word, yielding a result in the hundreds.

The reasons are many, and I can't purport to know them all, but one thing is quite clear: the other guys either have a stronger position or face less opposition when charging in regions that are more proportional to the scale of the transaction.

When 'value pricing' is mentioned in the context of translation, the first thing that comes to mind is large texts at low prices because their subjective value to the client is low. For example because the client is intellectually lazy enough not to realize that his accounting or HR or licensing arrangements are all vital to his business despite being non-core. In plainer word, this means some people won't think in terms broader than the one or two direct steps where the money comes in, as their horizons are too tight to think in a broader picture. Except perhaps if they're talking about your responsibility rather than your pay.

So, we have two options:

1. We could do some work that really can be sold to multiple purchasers, for example write books to which we retain the rights, of which more copies can always be made, and which will grow in value as we succeed, become more widely known, our ideas and concepts are proved by life etc. But remember, for example, that consultants who sell materials apart from advice don't necessarily make a fortune and neither necessarily do non-fiction authors.
2. 'Leverage' the fact that we really do have large audiences quite a lot of time, at least in business and marketing translation. In other cases we act in a supportive role for something that has that kind of reach. We could remind our clients and agencies of this fact, as well as being tougher in negotiations in general.

#2 essentially means the scale is there but we need to claim it more assertively.

Other applications of scale include:

specializing and focusing — yes, it may be the antithesis of low-cost translation, but it does actually allow you to cut your costs, or, rather, use them more efficiently
CAT software — it sometimes pays for itself already on the trial licence simply because of opening access to more work
education, hardware, software, anything else that's purchased once (or at least only every once in a while) but used daily

However, it doesn't end there. There are multiple other ways in which you can tap into entire networks and make those networks work for you — starting from the fact that every happy client is likely to recommend you to other people. Thus your effective reach grows. You can compare it to the number of friends of friends or 2nd or 3rd tier connections you have on social media. Often what it takes is to just do your job well and perhaps just a little extra.

Back to Stephanie's article, though:

You could at least consider associating with people and businesses whose services are mutually complementary with yours rather than competing against them. That's a powerful combination which is hard to beat, and it also bears some resemblance to the strategies actually used by the most economically successful translators. Those strategies tend to involve a lot of mingling in the clients' world. This is a no-brainer for translators who come from other fields in their middle age and later (e.g. lawyers, doctors and engineers making a 'lateral move' for one reason or the other), but it's also worth considering as a path for the younger guys for whom translation is their first real job. But the stress here — unlike the mingling with clients and potential clients that the gurus talk about — would fall on mingling with all those people whose clients might need your services, rather than themselves.

Where's the 'scale' here? You can't reach all those people alone. But you can reach them through people and businesses that it's humanly possible for you to keep in touch with. This is essentially what networking is about.

This is also similar to controlling the entire value chain, as cost leaders (companies that sell on the price and build their business model around it) sometimes try to do, which includes the way in which translation agencies increasingly try to control you and make you their property. Except here nobody owns anybody, you're working with friends.

Last but — definitely! — not least, let's look at some really smart thing she said:

Professional athletes don’t make the stadium snacks. They don’t hold the cameras, tend the grass, or manufacture the equipment. If they did, they wouldn’t have enough time and energy to practice and stay on top of their game.

Print it and hang it above your monitor. Engrave in gold. Whatever. But defeat the urge — drilled into you by translation teachers, translation marketers, translation business coaches and even trusted translator friends — to think that you must be a 'one-stop shop' for everything that relates to a client's computer files. Or anything else like that.

You don't have to — while specialize in only 1-2 fields of knowledge to make yourself more efficient — learn the ins and outs of dozens of software suites and low-level, low-skill office tasks that bottom-feeding agencies and sometimes clients are increasingly confident about asking translators to do. Do world-class experts, high-octane consultants etc. also sweep the floors in their clients offices and carry the client's suitcase?

You won't have the time to become a really great translator if you spend time becoming a really good office gopher. Something which you should decidedly leave to people for whom it is the only choice of work or the best one (or those who are sufficiently trained in it to take it to a whole new level).

Translation Is Worth Charging For!

Dear Reader, what I'm saying to you tonight is at variance with what most translation speakers and writers and gurus say — all of them more experienced, more economically knowledgeable and economically and professionally successful than I am. You have more reason to listen to them than to me. But I still say it. I can't not say it:

Translation is the core value of what you do, the service you provide to your clients. Don't advertise and build your brand and USP on 'more than translation'. Don't justify your prices with additional services or added value.

If your value proposal and your proposal in general is based on additional services or added value, you are sending the message that your core value and core services are not valuable, not worth charging for.

By contrast, translation is a prestigious professional service.

Becoming More Persuasive?

The essence of persuation is brevity.

 (Some guy somewhere. I forgot.)

Persuasion is a tricky sort of thing. So much hinges on your specific targets but also on your own personality, the way you talk, the way you move, the way you think, the way you are. It's not that something can't be persuasive in general, far from it, but whether it works or not in a specific case is always largely an individual matter.

If you want to appeal to a specific audience, you need to dissect it a bit, get the parameters, then proceed accordingly. Marta Stelmaszak loves to talk about this, but she also brings up the part that's about you, not about them.

Anyway, this lengthy introduction aside (the point of it being that you can't make it more persuasive without doing some persuading), I put my hands today on a short infomercial-style piece of advice intended for lawyers, titled Make Your Marketing More Persuasive (over at Attorney at Work), which made me think about something.

Before me move on, another boring introduction. I believe that translation marketing is mostly ugly, unbecoming and — often — unpersuasive, but persuasion is the least of its problems, actually. A great problem in that area is whom it persuades and what to, what of. (And it certainly doesn't lack pitch.)

In short, translation copywriting brings tears to my eyes. It's all gaudy and empty, the same old stale line about 'our 2000 linguists around the globe' from every single mum-and-pup sole-proprietary translation broker, where 'our network' in client correspondence = 'our database' in translator correspondence. The same plaintive eyes and manifestations of submissiveness from translators ('pick me! pick me!' and pyjama photo). The same 'cutting edge technology' that requires Visual Basic runtimes to work from everybody. And carpet-selling pitch and often errors. We clearly need external sources of inspiration. We need discipline and we need purpose. But I'm rambling.

The main theme of their advice is teams. Translators aren't pack animals (they are packing animals, beasts of burden), but every now and then something like that happens. It is sometimes proffered as an alternative to agencies, or rather to working with them or through them. In this context — yeah, it makes perfect sense to present a team bio, so to say, to offer some sort of team presentation.

Translation agencies should also do that — in lieu of the more common pretence that translators don't exist, which is backfiring, and which was a shot in the foot to begin with. If you don't have translators, you have MT — 'nuff said (anyway, this means that if you don't have highly qualified professionals doing the work for you, or if they are totally replaceable and individually meaningless gears in your machine, then perhaps you should charge cents, not dollars, for your factory output).

Translation agencies already pretend that there are teams. This is because clients like teams. As far as I know, sometimes translators co-ordinate terminology, double-check one another and divide work on the fly in a joint assignment, but 'joining our team' generally means the same as having your e-mail added to their database. I guess teams sell.

Next, show not tell is a marketing/advertising tradition that goes back to the old adage that a picture says more than a thousand words. Translators generally shy away from this because they are led to believe — who by, I wonder, or cui bono? — that their work is uninteresting. That the clients had better not be exposed to it lest their be offended by the smell. Yeah, right. Hogwash.

(It's uninteresting to zombie factory line operators and their clients, and even in their case possibly because nobody has shown them yet. The problem is obviously that the more unremarkable translators are, the less you can get away with paying them. Figure out the rest.)

It shouldn't be taken too literally: you can show something by telling about something else. And in the act of telling you sometimes show your expertise, such as when you tell your client about aspects of your work. You leave the mental connections for the client to figure out.

(This goes against the silly modern notion of spoonfeeding conclusions to your clients and telling them what to think, turning them into brainless but content little consumers. The ideal spenders for... never mind. I gotta watch my rambling today.)

Describe your work. But do it with a picture. Paint that picture with words.

(Probably the fewer the better, but let's not be too literal about this. Verbosity and precision have their uses, and it all has to do with your style. I remember reading about an old famous copywriter who'd describe everything in painful detail... wait, I was gonna watch it. On second thought: it ties in with explaining the process, another idea mentioned later on in the article. People who know what the process will look like and feel like are less scared when the process is taking place.)

Or, well, just use pictures. Many websites do that, and with modern design styles and modern server bandwidth this is not as much of a problem as it used to be.

Marta does a bit of that on her pricing page. She is quite sparing about it and for good reason — if you keep itemizing defining beyond reason and using factory-line sort of jargon, you'll just come out funny or arrogant or both. In any case, it will likely drive your rates into the ground. (Again, the exact outcome depends also on your audience.)

For a larger project you could prepare a more detail and verbose write-up, detailing any hours you're going to spend on something else than actually translating, any analytical steps you're going to take before you actually start, any checks during, anything else like that, any things you do before signoff.

(While at it, knowing translators and LSPs, you're probably going to mention 'client feedback' like a good ISO fanboy or fangirl should. Keep that in check. Clients are important, and what they have to say also is, but for once remember that they aren't experts on your work. They are not your proofreaders or editors. Unless they are. But do you really want a dentist to edit your legalese? Be somewhat mindful of what words you use or you'll end up achieving the standard impression that translators are office gophers who need to have their work supervised and reviewed by more senior professionals from more senior job lines.)

Do be careful with 'affordable', 'responsive' and stuff like that. It all has its legitimate applications, but if you don't do it in somewhat right (where somewhat leads to average results), you'll end up sounding plaintive and half-professional, about the sort of thing that a half-professional translation done by a multilingual may look like to you. This is the danger inherent in DIY marketing. If you don't know what exactly to do, you probably want to keep it simple. Either by making it short and concise or by just making it natural.

But when you're making it natural — which is very difficult to be when you're writing, especially in this type of context — you still need to watch it, to keep it professional. This mostly means no threadbare buzzwords like 'responsive' or 'affordable' unless you really mean them, or unless you just need them for a header under which you're telling things how they are (in a reasonably formal register, not too much and not too little).

Finally, don't think that asking very pretty — pretty please — to be hired is going to work. There are clients who like to be asked to allow you to work for them, but I'm not sure you want that type of clients unless they have some good reason to act like that. Personally, I believe that translators need to stop or reduce the 'pick me, pick me!' behaviour because it harms the prestige of the profession.

Not begging for the jobs is not inconsistent with taking proper care of your clients and appreciating them and their business. And clients — reasonable clients, at least — look for different qualities than obedience, pliability, submissiveness and a general willingness to run errands. Translators who enter into that mode and fail to get out of it will forever be treated like everybody's junior assistants. Translators are probably a cross between professional advisors and designers/writers, but in any case this is not a concierge job*.

(* A professional concierge is different from a submissive guy who's eager to run errands for fear of not getting whatever is his proper work, acting like a cheap and expendable non-professional personal assistant. I'm pretty sure professional concierges actually make more than professional translators, on average, and they have a knack for combining self-denial with personal dignity. Something I don't really see in a qualified and credential translator hiring himself out for oddoffice jobs on a very entry level. This is also the message some translators' online presentation sends right away without need to read into actual business correspondence and negotiation.)

The Third Way: Increase Awareness

Some minutes ago I read an article from Jim's Marketing Blog from two months ago, linked by Frau Newell somewhere on Facebook. It's worth reading in whole, but without further ado, according to the author's powerful opening statement (sort of):

To get that price / value balance right, we have 2 options:

1. We can pump more value into the product or service.
2. We can lower the price.

In the context of translation, I immediately thought of the third way, probably as a result of thoughts crossing my mind of late, perhaps since April or May:

Increase awareness.

Strictly speaking there is no contradiction here, as the value needs to be in before you can raise awareness about it. But it's worth noting that:

1. Once you put the premium value in, you'll need to communicate it or chances are it won't catch, which the author notes in saying: we are fooling ourselves if we expect prospective clients or customers to pay a premium, for something that’s average or close to average.
2. Chances are the premium value is already in, so you need not to add it but to communicate it, right now. Which is also in the text but requires some reading into it, preferably with an open mind.

My proposition is that translation does not need any more value pumped into it, it needs better communication of its existing value. Any communication of its value would be a good start.

Actually, it would be false to say that no value communication exists, but it rests on the wrong premises:

1. Added services of a kind which is really copy-shop services, or office assistance or entry-level technical assistance, which puts the profile of the profession below what translators' education and credentials would suggest.
   
   A lawyer will naturally end up gophering quite a lot in his initial years at the firm, even brew a couple of cuppas while at it, but no firm ever advertises lawyer-made coffee and lawyer-made copies as the added value that sweatens the deal, let alone its unique sales position. And this even though some lawyers are really conscious about courtesy, hospitality and warm and cosy client care. Plus, if a lawyer drove a truck, it would still be pilled at the same hourly rate as legal advice.
   
   
   
   (Or real consulting but without real qualifications. I recall a European translation agency contract where one of the attachments, an ethical code actually, required translators to check the correctness of source code while localizing software. I also recall a smart client who ordered legal advice 'localized', with a translation price tag and not legal advice price tag. Many translators probably have tales of expectations of typesetting, DTP, graphical editing and all sorts of checks in addition to just translating well.)
   


2. Making translators look like that cleaning person with hidden talents, who is probably inreality a good fairy and who will quietly fix and polish a corporate manager's reports, filings and sales mail while sweeping and mopping his office at night. That, and Captain-Obvious-style consulting, telling clients things any twelve year old should know.
   
3. Silly, unnecessary, outright dumb kinds of forcibly peddled added value such as preserving the intact layout of... incoming mail, down to copying the sender's signatures and logos over to the translation. I would question the soundness of mind of any client who really wanted to have his incoming mail translated like that as opposed to having it inadvertently peddled to himself by a translation agency or even translator anxious to furnish something, anything remunerable.
   
4. Distasteful manifestations of ready obedience, submission and flattery, comparable to falling prostrate before the client and begging for scraps that fall from his table. 'Your wish is my command' is a real translation tag line I've seen, but by far not the only one in the same vein. You don't win respect that way. And you get scraps, bones, not serious compensation for your services.
   

Much of it is probably due to the situation translators and agencies currently live in, having their self-esteem constantly undermined and even sometimes functioning in circumstances in which self-esteem is a luxury some just can't afford.

The one thing is, if you don't have faith in yourself, it's hard to expect that others will. I'm not encouraging you to embrace the vice of pride but rather to take honest inventory of your skills and qualifications, their worth, their value, the path that led you to achieving them, the effort, the emotional reward. See the good things, the valuable, the unique. If translation represents no real value to you, then something is going wrong.

The other thing is that unlike what many (but not all!) marketing writers and speakers currently preach, it's not exclusively about defined benefits, or wants, or exclusively things that pertain to your client's business and not you. And it certainly is not about worshipping the ground the client walks on and wagging your tail hoping he'll throw a bone, which is as poor a strategy for winning clients as it is for winning girlfriends. To get a client hooked — and turning clients into hardcore fans is an idea I first heard from a law blogger — you need to tell story. It always is about a story. There are places in this world where stories are currency and the sum of $1, $10 and $100 is 3 colourful paper trinkets, not 111 dolars.

Tell a personal story. There is a reason lawyers use bios on their websites. About 60% of their traffic goes to the bios. Personal does not mean TMI, so skip the laundry of your multilingual home (unless you really are a good writer), but do tell a story about your academic studies and your professional path and the work you do these days. Don't be daft and presume that it would be of no interest to your client, like many people say. How do they know? Besides, I believe I've already covered the nonsense of treating your client like an alcoholic father (who must not be upset in the slightest, not made to listen to even a hint of something that's of no immediate relevance to him and his current situation).

Everybody loves to hear stories, you just need to find a way to tell them without driving people off or putting them to sleep. If you perceive yourself as a 'cultural mediator' (two individuals are also two cultures, on some level), a 'builder of bridges' or whatever else translation propaganda currently bills us as being, it would be a good test of the skills you supposedly rely on for a living.

By way of illustration, I never studied languages or translation myself at a university level because back at the time I'd thought it would teach me nothing new. (Edit: Oh wait, I did for a year in 2010-2011.) However, a couple of months ago, I was mining the faculty website for terminology and buzz words when translating a colleague's transcripts, and I got hooked on the narrative. It sucked me in and wouldn't let me go. Why oh why can't translators put similar narrative on their own websites? If it worked on a cormudgeonly skeptic like yours truly...

In short, believe in the value of what you do. Communicate that belief. Make it contagious. Show, not tell, even using words for the purpose. Give your prospective clients a chance to appreciate the value. They can't if you won't let them.

Don't Sell a Company by the Stock (Moving Beyond the Word Count and the Minimum Charge)

I'm not a fan of word rates. As much as I'd prefer to remain objective and pragmatic, I probably am biased against them. They introduce a small, cheap unit which makes the billing look petty. They mentally associate our work with word-by-word conversion, which we know is not the case even in literal translation. They produce nonsense high numbers like 45,000 words. And they invite contention: What exactly counts as a word? (There can be a 15% difference between analyses from two different CAT tools.)

Per-word billing surely has its advantages. I discussed them a while ago along with the disadvantages. I actually concluded they possibly outweighed the disadvantages, at least in the context of time-based rates and pure flat rates (i.e. flat rates with no underlying figures provided to the client). Yet, I still find it difficult to like it. Perhaps as a Pole used to per-page billing — which is one heckuva bother to work with, by the way — I might just simply be biased against the smaller unit, but who knows, perhaps there's more to it.

Pages are better, to my mind, because they are not so ridiculously micro-scale. They rely on a character count, though, and that's subjective too, in the why-didn't-you-choose-a-shorter-word-when-one-was-available sense, and obviously characters are smaller than words. And 'standard' pages are hopeless in comparison to real-life pages. Because the A4 pages, not the 'standard' pages, are the real thing, and the clients actually get that right.

Speaking of which, and we're now getting closer to what I really want to talk about, clients are frustrated with translation billing systems. If they had a chance to avoid them, they'd probably jump at it. So why not give it to them, especially if we aren't exactly thrilled with them ourselves to begin with?

Sometimes clients asking for a quotation will describe the text in some detail but not actually offer much more than a ballpark estimate in terms of volume. A hint, yeah, but that's it. To them, the volume is relevant but not all-controlling.

And they got that right too. Their attitude is healthier than our own, even though we are the professionals. Word counts are often useless with short texts. I've done 2500 words in an hour, and I've done 120. And we use different rates for different kids of texts anyway, or surcharges. Mileage may vary, but probably every translator has some experience with this.

You may even have noticed that per-word rates don't rise hand-in-hand with time required to complete the task. Something which takes 80% more time may command a 20% premium (for a 33% effective pay cut), but I wouldn't count on more. On the other hand, simpler jobs capped 20% below your rates may save you 80% work time (for a 300% raise).

One thing that frustrates me is how often translation requires equal or greater knowledge and skill than the writing of the original text did, and yet translation fees may still be so unimpressive compared to whatever the text must have cost. Such as dozens versus hundreds, or hundreds versus thousands. Or so we think. There are many hungry writers, actually, and copywriters aren't necessarily any richer than translators.

On 1 May, I took a look at six-figure copywriter Ed Gandia's pricing guide, which is the equivalent of a menu card and which he shared as training material for other freelancers in line with his passion for teach. The document actually mentions word counts for most of the items, but it first and foremost pairs typical deliverables with their corresponding prices, or even quite vast price ranges such as $1000–$2000, usually including a very short specification of input (hours) or output (words) unless the task is straightforward enough to be self-evident.

So just why can't translators say: e-mail, short: this many bucks; e-mail, long: that many bucks? Website this, article that?

Especially considering that many of those things fall under the flat, all-across-the-board minimum charge many of demand for the shortest jobs?

The per-word pricing of projects which are very demanding but small in size, based on rates appropriate for long blocks of texts, is quite the nuisance and scourge of today's translation 'industry', where people come in with tightly packed copy where every word has been optimised, they unload on you style guides and instructions which are pretty much a campaign brief, and reference materials, all of which takes hundreds of times longer to read than that copy, and and they expect to pay pennies for it because that's how your pricing system works. And obviously that's cheaper than hiring a new advertising agency native to the target language, and there just might be a chance of effectively unloading a copywriter's brief on a translator. Something's gotta change in that system.

With larger orders, on the other hand, apart from the most obvious volume discount, sometimes we notice that clients don't even know how many zeroes to expect, hance they have those ideas of translating entire books for a couple hundred bucks. And that's also something which must change, and again, it doesn't require Swiss precision, just a ballpark range, even $10,000-$20,000.

If every translator's or agency's website said that translating a book cost several dozen thousand, people wouldn't be asking to have it translated for several hundred, and there'd be pressure to meet such a demand. Or a temptation to find a freelance contractor who would.

If you wonder about the hundreds, they are probably what a consumer can intuitively come up with as the value of removing the language barrier from a book the consumer wants to read, effectively unlocking it, in a way, just like he or she completes a micro transaction with an online bookshop on a smart phone with Internet connection.

In that light, a price in the hundreds is a generous offer since the book probably costs in the dozens! The consumer thinks about his or her own costs or value, not about production costs, economy of scale and so on. After tall, it is several times what the book costs, so doesn't it contain a healthy premium for meeting a custom demand? — Even though it grotesquely fails to reflect production costs (which are almost all labour), of which the consumer is unaware.

A debuting author may also lack a better idea. And the 'industry' has this unhealthy drive to please and to enable, which probably makes such transactions happen at least from time to time. You'd think about 'enabling' intercultural bridges and dialogues and even sales, sure, but they'd also think about enabling translation of however much text the client needs translated for however little money the client has to pay. Because that's enabling to business types, who are not quite our agents and don't work for our benefit.

Clearer now? I hope so.

Per-project approach is not a nonexistent concept in translation. You may already have used it, except not for pricing but in your CV or portfolio or some form of experience profile. Whatever you may want to say about 'online marketplaces', Proz.com's user profiles have a project tab where the volume in words or pages (or a couple of other units) is just one of the many variables you can enter and by far not the most important one. Last time I checked, volume was close to the bottom and rate wasn't even there — pun intended.

Got it?

Project. Project role. Project description. Language. Field. Finally volume. Per day if you feel like it that way.

You've probably been asked a couple of times by a client or agency to provide or at least approve and agree to freeze a certain specific lump sum of money to be your set-in-stone fee for the project. That's a per-project fee.

You can't make as much money selling words as you probably could make selling projects. Words are meaningless, projects are defined and have meaning.

Besides, they all tell you that you need to be unique, or brand yourself so, if you want to succeed as a freelance translator (or any sort of freelance professional), or just plain sell so you can make an income. But it really is about the client — which is why business websites talk about 'you' so much, for example — so why don't we make the client feel unique? Projects are unique, words are not.

Let's do some stock trading.

As a translator perhaps sometimes you fancy yourself a mediator between cultures (or markets — look at what Marta does) or facilitator or even enabler of opportunities (again, look at how Marta does it). Effectively, if your client is a business client, you're selling that client business. For example if your client is a realtor, you sell him a chance to sell homes to more people, and if your client is a cat lady with a knack for breeding the furballs for sale, then you're selling her the opportunity to exchange purrs and meows for dollars, euros etc. with people who don't speak her language.

So imagine you're a professional business salesperson now. Meaning you sell companies for a living (something which Marta would be terrific at). How do you do it?

Are you selling and pricing them by the stock? Puh-lease!

And words are just like stocks. There can be common stocks, preference shocks, voting stocks, non-voting stocks, treasury stocks. They can be restricted, or there can be a rights issue or not. There are typically thousands of them (possibly millions), and they typically have par value, basically face value, which typically means zilch because it's only vaguely connected with anything in real life where it originally came from, nobody remembers when. Sound familiar?

There's more to a company than the sum total of its stocks.

You'll try to see if the name sells, if there's a brand value to cash in on. You'll see and talk about what the company does or can do — or it won't be of any value to a lazy investor if its a niche thing nobody in the general market has heard about, or perhaps a crafty investor will pretend he doesn't see the value and look what profit he makes after getting it cheap off you. You may try and leverage some sort of a legendary founder or manager's personally, which basically means selling a personal story. Or you could lay the claim that its people are the company's most important asset and focus on the immaterial value created by the team and its synergies and everything the workers do together. You could also emphasise any synergies with whatever the buyer's business might be doing or the company's potential for reselling, preferably with a premium after restructuring the thing, paying off the creditors and breathing in some fresh air. Anything but the 48,531 common stocks and 20,387 preference stocks at the going stock-market price.

(Village stocks at Chapeltown, England. Photo: Austen Redman, Wiki Commons.)

Alternatively, perhaps think about your classmate who is now a realtor or works for one, or has in the past, or just knows one. Ask how the realtor feels about selling properties and buildings and apartments by the square metre or square yard. What about the square foot? Or how about square inch for that matter? (There going to be thousands of such inches even in a small apartment, check in Google.)

Even where it's same old flat for one working class family as for thousands of others (which can make it easier to miss that it's supposed to become someone's home and possibly a life-time investment), the realtor would probably still rather be talking about the nice architecture of the building (better still if the architect actually had an identifiable name) and the snazzy modern or quaint old finish of its exterior, the warm and inviting or cool and intriguing colours, the river front and the park, and the underground station nearby or at least the bus, and preferably health care at hand and supermarket nearby, you get the point. Might even want to talk to you about how cosy the house or apartment feels inside. Better still, how cosy you can make it feel and experience it, and so on. Something along these lines. Anything but casual vending by the metre — the square metre still being the omnipresent and never fully escapable parametr in their industry anyway, just like the word or page is in our own.

As a translator you almost certainly know that words are just a billing unit, a convention, a pars pro toto, something which simply makes it easier to calculate the price of a project. There are normally different prices for the same units depending on different circumstances, except that nowadays translation agencies have forced on us one flat rate for everything — claiming that they need this or they won't know how much to budget — no matter what sorts of different rates and surcharges they may be getting from the client on account of various variables describing the text or the job.

So don't allow the word to become the main thing — or rather try to dislodge it from its current role as the main thing — and see that there is value in completeness, in wholeness.

A complete thing is worth more than the sum total of its isolated constituent parts. Which is, among other things, why building your computer was something the computer shop charged you for, or advertised it as a freebie (markup being distributed among the parts' prices), or you had to do it yourself. Same with words. And sentences. And pages.

Back to minimum fees now. Let's think pragmatically. If you have a minimum charge which is the same as the price of, say, a thousand (1000) words, that's already longer than many a type of document or text will be.

What could prevent you from just simply listing those types of documents on a page, from top to bottom, with the same price repeated all over?

(And the typical number of words in brackets, because that's where I'm driving at.)

Projects sell. Words don't.

Then you could go up from there. Double the word count and see what fits in it. There's quite a lot of stuff in the 1500-2000 range. And that's a size you can easily grasp in your imagination! No complex thought devices like when you try to imagine 60,000 words, which is just a book of about 200 pages, but did you even know before I told you? (And I barely avoided needing to use a calculator for this figure just because I took easy numbers.) You can probably just see or feel, in your mind, the five or six pages that is, depending on how many and how large pictures. So you can basically stay on top of the size, mentally, and do some other operations like imagining how the complexity of the text or the need for research affects your workload and time investment and any monetary investment. Or the value your client receives.

(And how about entertaining the idea that a short description under a concept picture, which together takes a whole page, might perhaps be worth as much as a page-long block of text? I'm not saying it is, but it just might. And it might because there's a whole formula for that, which everybody uses for everything, and which was created by the David Ogilvy, the Father of Advertising. Yes, websites look like that too, millions of them (and websites are currently taking after printed media because modern Internet bandwidth can afford full-screen or half-screen JPG and PNG file sizes). And it's not like you don't have to look at the picture when you translate, or like those witty things take you only as little time as a paragraph of normal text in some sales report or balance sheet.)

Notably, if you're a legal translator — contracts typically stay under 2500-3500 words, and 10,000 is a separate genre. Website copy for a lawyer, or his client-getting letter, almost invariably takes between 5.5 and 6.5 standard pages (10,000–12,000 characters or ~1400-1600 words), and lawyers aren't even unique in this regard. Correspondence often has standard lengths, largely related to physical page count. Forms are by definition standardised, and the space in the blanks isn't unlimited. Nor is the court's patience, so some courts have a rule in place like no more than 50 pages with a specific font size, line space and margin size.

Pragmatic hint: Talk to colleagues, exchange experience, put together a list.

So create a list, a table with ballpark figures. Add descriptions. You can even put in a disclaimer about non-standard lengths, so you won't have to translate a 5000-word brochure for $200. For added value, you will impress your clients with your knowledge and organisation, something freelancers don't always have a good reputation for. And if you have a PDF sheet or online price list, a figure listed in there will sound more credible than anything you've only just come up with. And it will make life easier for your clients. And easier for you.

You also have a chance to let clients know how much work those documents tend to take. You can't blame your clients for not knowing if nobody has told them, or corrected them when they guessed wrong. If the 1000 words take 1-2 hours of research, say that. If applying a 50-page style guide to a 2-page translation takes 5 hours, again, say that. You can mention editing and proofing separately. Just state the workload if you have the nagging feeling that clients have no faint idea. Give them a chance.

And give yourself a chance to do work you'd enjoy if it weren't for its dollar-to-hour ratio.