If You're Overworked, Up Your Rates! (to Up Your Game)

One of the complaints we sometimes hear — and sometimes envy — on freelancers' social media is too much work and having to decline.

The first thing people think about in response is work-and-life balance.

Yes, being overworked is not good for balance, but there is a different point to raise:

If you decline a lot simply because you don't have free slots, it means you've sold your capacity out and the demand still exists.

Without getting into theory, that means you could probably charge more.

It's not certain you could get away with charging more, it's only probable — and worth checking if you can do so without taking on too much risk.

And it's difficult to tell how much more — there are too many variable factors to play guesses here without knowing details of your situation.

But it's probable you could get away with quoting at least a little higher fees than you quote now.

Note: This applies if running out of capacity occurs regularly to you, not just once in a blue moon.

If you simply have peak periods that throw you off balance, develop a coping strategy for that specifically, e.g. a network of colleagues not all of whom will be experiencing peaks at the same time.

But if you regularly run out of capacity at your current rates, those rates should be going up.

Remember, as a freelancer you won't get a raise from your clients. Just like a law firm, private clinic or design studio, clients won't normally spontaneously offer to pay you more than they did one or two years ago or than you quoted them. You'll only be paid more if you charge more.

Some ethical doubts may arise here, and I want to deal with them separately in the section below the line. If you don't have any such doubts, don't waste your time reading further.

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Ethically, you shouldn't worry about whether or not you deserve the raise based on the circumstances, the circumstances being e.g. that you like more time off and begin to wonder if something like that should affect how much you charge or entitles you to a raise.

I suggest focusing instead on the ultimate rates you'll end up charging. Will they be fair? Sticking a knife to someone's throat to help yourself get an objectively fair fee would be unethical. But using supply & demand to stop being underpaid by taking a tougher position? Hardly!

Using legitimately obtained knowledge for the legitimate purpose of resisting demands for rebates that your clients don't deserve is hardly unethical.

Next point, if you believe you're already making enough, however low that could be, so you believe you don't need more. Fine. Great. You don't have to keep the money. Donate it to a charity of your choice. Or work less (charge more, so you'll work fewer hours) and donate your time instead. But undercharging for work that generates real money for your clients is not the answer, especially if it puts financial pressure on your colleagues, some of whom may be in a tougher situation than you are.

If you want to spend your time doing the job you love and still don't feel comfortable charging more than you honestly believe you need, then perhaps work for charities and pro bono causes rather than business clients. Undercharging business clients does no good, and it destroys the market for everybody else.


If you're a single guy who lives on bread and water, owns no property to maintain, pays very little rent and bills, doesn't like to travel, doesn't like hobbies, doesn't like to travel, doesn't need anything really, or somoene who doesn't depend on the job for income, then like I said there's still the matter of what undercharging does to your colleagues and the matter of who's the best qualified recipient of your charity.

It's your time and your money, of course, so I don't want to give the impression of accusing you of doing something wrong, but perhaps think if that's really what you want to be doing. My goal is not to denigrate that approach but to show that any moral high ground would be up to debate, as there are better uses for whatever talents you may have than semi-donating them to for-profit enterprises.

We May All Need Fancy Marketing Soon, a.k.a. Distinguish or Perish (in the Battle of Quotes)

They say 'diversify or die'. Today I want to say 'distinguish or perish'.


Clients, even consumers, already mail 20 providers in BCC, asking for a quote, then pick the cheapest or the best blend, according to them. Which is usually very different from what a choice based on professionally relevant criteria would be.

The cheapest is something you can't help, unless you want that to be you. And you don't, because someone's always going to work for exposure or experience if it comes to it. Or for fun. You can't possibly be the cheapest unless you pay them.

But you can help the best blend. The blend is a sweet spot. The sweet spot where supply best meets demand, or so the client thinks. The best fit.

By saying more about yourself, accurately and in an encouraging way if you can help it, you can't convince mass askers. Not often at least. But you can persuade people away from masking. Or you can convince them before they mass ask.

You can make them think that you're the only option, or the best, or just good enough so there's no need to look further.

My personal take is that the less ambitious, more modest target of 'just good enough so there's no need to look further' is a good, solid base to cover before you fiddle with the fancy stuff. First the basics, then the extras — if at all.

We may all need this if the trend for getting multiple quotes, even on small jobs and even by consumers, continues to rise.

That, and, of course, we need to stop gambling our precious time with the 20 other people in the BCC field. Doesn't mean we should give them exactly zero time, though. Nope. There is a war to wage, so there are battles to fight.

It is good to have a canned response in which you state just what your rates would be for the same job in normal circumstances, while refusing to enter the battle of quotes. This is the least you can do to help unteach them the bad thinking habits, such as that they can get a special (i.e. reduced) offer for just asking and for just being them. Y'know, everybody is special, but so is everybody else. And his dog.

Still, show them you considered their inquiry/requirement/need individually, but the size of your fee is based on standard applicable rates.

Else, if they keep only getting responses from people who are prepared to play their game, they'll end up with a distorted view of the market, thinking everybody else is unavailable or uninterested and those who do respond represent the industry opinion as a whole. Which is not the case (or so I hope).

Dear Client,

Thank you for your interest. It is my policy not to participate in competitive quotes. This e-mail is emphatically not a bid.

For reference, my standard applicable fee for your particular request (as specified in your mail) would be XXX.

Always feel free to contact me for a specific quotation or booking. Please, however, keep in mind my policy not to participate in competitive bidding.

Sincerely,

Provider

Just an example.

If you feel like it, you can consider adding something to the tune of:

Please be aware that due to the low statistical probability of having the project assigned to me out of all of the providers asked for this quotation I am prevented from being able to spend as much time preparing a more tailored quote as is normally the standard of care I give to my clients.

And yes, not a single comma. Be confident. Transmission, not dialogue. And certainly no arguing or pleading. Just remember to turn it into generally acceptable passive-aggressive corpobabble without showing a genuine human side.

Reading Copious Briefs and Reference Materials Shouldn't Be Free of Charge!

Everybody outsources things these days. Even quite internal things. Outsourcing is good because it frees you of all the hassle of the special treatment employees get. And allows you to pay people when you actually need them, not for the entire time of just being there.

On the other hand, more and more clients yearn for the special treatment an employer traditionally gets. They want someone to get to know them, in fact quite intimately (in business terms), to become dedicated to them, to give them one's all, and so and so forth. And sometimes they want all those benefits right off the box, where they take months or years to achieve with employees or some other variety of in-house staff. And they certainly want customized, tailored services.

… But they also want to keep paying only for what's billable or tangible, or just the standard price of a standard service.

Clients sometimes need to be reminded — gently if possible — that outsourcing is for not paying people when you are not in fact using them. It's not some magic of the invisible hand of the market for getting a month's worth of attention for a week's worth of pay and save a ton on costs while reaping all the benefits.

Here's an analogy that also works for services that have rarely been done in-house and thus needed to be outsources but have traditionally been purchased from the market:


If you're buying a single loaf of bread at the standard two or three bucks per, you don't get to mail the bakery a 20-page PDF detailing your absolutely essential, holy inviolable specs. You could get more luck with a custom order, especially  But even a custom order than normally takes them a day will get them to spend a week studying your PDFs. No chance. Nobody's going to eat that cost for you.

High time our clients appreciated this basic fact of life. High time we did.

Don't Immediately Concede a Discount Just Because the Client Complains (and Seems to Expect One)

Sorry for the lousy title, but I need to focus on the contents.

In better times this is perhaps a rare oddity, if not unheard of, but these days whimsical and borderline incompetent checking and correcting of translations by clients and agencies is something we keep hearing about all the time. I've come to the conclusion it can't be just the coincidental subjective experience of a couple of people, there must be more of it, as in a trend, hence this post.

This is going to be a controversial statement, but in my opinion there is a general decline in competence, morality and manner (as in class act) worldwide, so no wonder professional ethics and courtesy also are slackening and people don't seen an ethical problem in biased adversarial examination of and complaints about goods and services they procure, in the hope of saving some money.

In our so-called translation industry (how I hate the term!), this is compounded by how agencies end up with cheap proofreaders due to all their cost-cutting, which means that senior external translators end up having their work checked and graded by junior inhouse staff. The same happens in corporations when, out of the same desire to cut costs, someone decides to DYI it. If not the translation, then the checking.

In either case it may be compounded by how the choice of expression is largely subjective, as are outlooks on equivalence, as are skill levels and judgements thereof. Egos are involved. Face-saving is involved, sometimes real cover-ups and damage control after someone botches the job, the project, notably by already having procedured translation on the cheap before, which not only backfired but also drained the budget.

Or, like in the old Indian tale of two wolves, there's not only good and evil in every single one of us but also intelligence and stupidity, controlled behaviour and freaking out, class act and poor manner. The one wolf that wins is the one we feed. Our clients and their staff, and brokers, also have wolves to feed and make their choices. Translation procurement tends to be inexplicably conducive to making just the wrong, stupid choices. And let's not forget about people who just don't know how bad they are, or at least not as highly qualified as they think, especially for work they haven't studied and trained for, or at least learned the language.

(This notably includes a great deal of native speakers of the target language in translation, retained by clients and brokers often for little merit beyond their native origin, who so often just don't know all the rules or just plain can't write. But it also includes a great deal of 'proficient' non-natives who think they're good enough to doubtless be the innocent party in a dispute with a qualified native writer or translator. And then loads of people who aren't particularly familiar with the field but go ahead and edit other people's writing anyway.)

The point? Stop overthinking. You won't likely find out which is the case, let alone find the comfort of certainty. What you need to realize is that shit happens — every day. Yes, it happens. Today, a fellow translator wrote about how an agency explicitly asked her to look for errors, find some, grade it down, help them save some buck. When confronted with this reality, you need to avoid compulsively looking for fault within yourself and taking the blame just to avoid having to acknowledge that the world is a bad place and people can be jerks.

Fend it off, cast off the fog, keep your mind clear. Check twice if you they don't have a point, but if you can't find legit errors, and serious enough, then you need to confront the reality that no, the client is not always right in general, and that your client is not right, right here and now, in particular.

If you still grant a discount, for example to avoid non-payment because you realistically need the money and have no other way to see at least some of it, or you just won't the client to go away without going out of his way to damage your reputation (you already damage it by making it look like you're admitting errors that just aren't there!), then I won't judge you, but it should be your decision, not an automatism.

Automatic discounts on every complaint — which is nb. sometimes the way things work with translation agencies — only encourage frivolous complaints. Remember, a lot of people are amoral in some degree in business. They just see numbers, cash flows, equations, impersonal operations to manage, they don't really think or feel much beyond that it makes sense to save money where you can. Which includes where a weaker 'vendor' will let you. So don't.

This said, I certainly don't encourage dismissing legitimate complaints, especially not as a matter of policy. And yes, this too is a policy companies have long discovered and tested in practice by now. Just consider how clients and brokers use the broken-record strategy to deflect your overdue payment requests, piling on outlandish excuses one after one, avoiding you or outright stalling. I certainly am not saying this is what we should do to our clients when they have cause to worry or outright complain or even demand a discount, a deserved one.

But simply wanting a discount covers exactly zero distance toward deserving it or proving that they do. Again, I'm not saying the burden of proof should by sky-high, but a nude demand or some sort of faux proofreading doesn't rise to the level. It doesn't rise much above floor level, and it rather goes quite lower than that. It's quite low indeed, and has no place from respected companies — as soon as you can establish it wasn't just an accident at work (you need to probe gently before they get defensive and start opposing you on principle), you need to let them know it won't fly and in fact it's quite bad of them to even have tried.

We need to send the message that changing times have not made the practice acceptable.

Why It Is OK to Limit Liability (12 Pointers)

Wait? What? Limited liability? Isn't that avoiding responsibility for your own actions?

Nope. Not necessarily anyway. And certainly there's more to it. We could argue the details to no end, so let's just state some general pointers. Food for thought:

• Don't presume that it's natural or obvious for malpractice liability to meet the full extent of the first quantifiable value of some sort of damages that comes to your mind or someone else brings up. Things aren't so simple. The first quantifiable value someone intuitively comes up with is not likely to coincide with what the outcome of full, objective and exhaustive analysis would be after properly gathering and processing all the information available. For example it may occur to you — or someone else — that if a translation agency loses a client because of a translator's mistake, then the responsible translator should pay damages to the value of the entire turnover with that client. However, that seems reasonable only superficially. It doesn't account for the possibility of replacing that lost client with a new one after a couple of cold calls or just having spare capacity that will soon get all used up by other existing clients. So should the agency get the compensation and get to sell the freed capacity anyway, for double the money? Or should the agency be allowed to call it a day and send the sales rep home early because the translator is paying? This is the kind of nonsense that results from coming up with and too easily accepting arbitrary values based on emotional notions, as opposed to proper analysis.
• By contrast, it's natural to expect businesses to take precautions (forward looking) and act (react) to avoid or mitigate damage. If they don't, notably because they want to save the cost, then why should the increased risk be yours and not theirs? It would be like a general partnership in which you get 0% share in the profits but only a worker's wage, plus 100% share in any hypothetical loss. Who in his right mind would agree to that? There is no rational or ethical reason for a client's recklessness, carelessness or risk appetite (gambling) to allocate gains to the client and losses to the professional service provider.
• Some risk-creating or risk-increasing choices by clients are legitimate because they respond to a reasonable need or pursue a reasonable objective. However, should the risk so created or increased — for example because of restricted access to information — be borne by someone who doesn't even know about it? Someone who doesn't even get the opportunity to reject the deal based upon the knowledge of the risks involved, which is withheld from him by the other party? Should companies be allowed to have their cake and eat it too like that? Should professional service providers be doomed to not even know the risks they assume against their will?
• The last point holds true about the value and kind of the transaction in general, but it is all the more true in respect of any special risk factors, notably ones that may lead to special or consequential damages or anything else you wouldn't normally presume or foresee or prepare against anyway. The business client should be acting to prevent them, not outsource them to someone who isn't even aware of effectively becoming the client's insurer for the client's gainful transaction with some other entity. Again, should the client have the cake and eat it too?
• Professional service providers are not insurance companies. Insurance per se is not even an explicit added value included in the transaction. It's just a convenient by-product that companies sometimes seek. And if they are allowed complete secrecy and zero disclosure, then they might as well seek professional services specifically to get free insurance, not even to get the service per se
• Insurance companies are the first to want to know about all the risks involved — type, size, probability, impact etc. They spend their precious time doing proper, mathematical calculations for all of those things. Does the though of having to do such calculations feel over the top to you? Would it feel the same if you knew $20M was at stake? Which is probably more money than you'll make or at least save in your life but which a single contract in international trade may be worth more than — just to give you perspective.
• Are you actually paid for guaranteeing the safety of your clients' transactions? This is essentially what we're talking about: the justice and the price of such a guarantee of safety being included in your fee. This is still true even if the safety would be from the consequences of your own mistakes. Why, you may ask: Because the probability and especially the impact of bad consequences of your mistakes still depends on factors that are beyond even your knowledge, whereas they are usually in your client's control, such as withholding information from you. Or are you only being paid for labour, i.e. the actual time and toil you expend on your client's behalf regardless of the value of the client's business transaction involved? If you're only paid what is essentially a labourer's wage and not an agent's commission corresponding to the value of the transaction, then you aren't being paid for being an insurer against all sorts of stuff that isn't communicated to you — precisely because you would likely refuse if you only knew.
• Remember that people who are professionals in assuming liability — insurers namely — always require full disclosure and disclaim liability, or increased liability, for anything you fail to disclose.
• They also give their clients instructions to follow. Taking more risks or more lightly, more haphazardly than your insurance policy allows voids it. You don't get any compensation if you forget to fix a broken alarm or replace your lock after losing your keys, or divulge your passwords. Ironically, some of these client-generated risks we're talking about are precisely precautions dictated by insurance companies (notably your restricted access to information about whatever you're helping them achieve).
• The premium you have to pay for an insurance policy depends on the type and size (probability and impact) of the risk covered, as well as the precautions you as the insured or beneficiary agree to take in order to avoid or reduce that risk. How much would a policy have to cost to cover all the property in your house, with no limits on value, and still allow you to not even lock your door and still claim compensation? Just simply because you have a policy? Why should such insurance effectively be provided by professional service providers and within a labourer's wage rather than an agent's commission? Should business companies get more insurance — with no restrictions or obligations — from their service providers simply because they pay for a service than they get under insurance policies when they pay so much more money to their insurers specifically for insurance coverage?
• Remember: For business clients and brokers, agencies etc. this whole issue isn't about ethics or morality as they may claim when trying to silence your objections with an inapplicable, logically flawed appeal to justice such as 'you should be resposible for your actions'. Nope. It's about changing the owner of the risk involved in the whole thing. Risk which they themselves create or increase for example to save some money or protect their secrets or otherwise benefit. Ordering the service from you conveniently places you as the new owner of the risk they want to get rid of on the cheap, i.e. without taking proper precautions themselves and without paying someone else to take them or just assume the liability in case something happens.
• Ethically, however, their argument is still fundamentally flawed: Why should you be expected to automatically and with no additional pay assume greater risks because your client elects to create or increase a risk or skip sensible precautions? Why should the client be entitled to the savings but free of the risks created by them? — So that someone who didn't create the risk gets 0% share in the gain and 100% share in the loss? How is any of the foregoing fair or ethical or reasonable?

My opinion: Yes, your mistake is yours. But the size of the damage and the probability of the damage occurring is mostly controlled by the client. Don't be a hostage. Don't be a scapegoat. Don't be set up like that. Get professional insurance. Double-check your work. But demand sufficient information about all risk factors affecting anything that your client wants you to be potentially liable for, and sufficient budget to take all the precautions you need. If the client won't give you the information or the budget, you just don't give your client free insurance against unknown risks generated and increased by the client at will without so much as notifying you so you could prepare.

You also need to take additional precautions with any intermediaries involved, as risks relating to restricted or distorted information grow exponentially the more people or companies are in the chain. So does the risk of your mistake — let's say a small mistake that's undeniable and undeniably yours — leading to huge consequences because of someone else's risk-taking attitude. And it's simply not fair for you to incur something to the tune of $20M liability because the agency wouldn't spend $200 on a proofreader or editor — of which the client may not even be aware, or, if aware of it, then not aware of the consequences.

You just don't get enough infomation to promise unlimited liability. You don't even know what exactly you would be liable for and what sums would be involved. You certainly don't know what risks they are taking and what else they're not telling you. You aren't told quite possibly because you would refuse the job if you knew. Or you could want a higher budget or longer deadline. Remember this.

Also, look up information asymmetry.

The Month's Proceeds Is Not Your Salary

Because of how translation is not a material product with a clearly visible cost structure and cannot be compared to other services easily, compensation of salaried employees is a natural point of reference.

Such comparisons are not necessarily correct, however. In fact, I would say in most cases they probably are not. They are more likely to be apples and oranges.

Here's why:


For starters, there is more to the total cost of maintaining a salaried position in a company than just the salary paid to the employee who fills that position. In other words, any function in an organization is more expensive than just the incumbent's salary.

Here are some examples of what the employer has to pay to keep a salaried position:

• 'naked' salary
• additional benefits and incentives, if any
• taxes and insurance
• paid holiday leave
• overtime pay (extra pay but often also extra rates)
• training, CPD etc.(usually at least a little, sometimes quite a lot)
• physical workplace — room, furniture, computer hardware and software, other specific expenses required for the job
• some tiny corresponding part of the organization's total costs and expenses — rent and bills, utilities, facilities, support staff, external services and everything else that's relevant

The applicability and size of these costs will vary from one situation to the next, but the point is that:

• any job or function in an organization costs at least a little more than the holder's salary
• freelancers pay anywhere from some to all of those costs out of their own pocket
• even if the 'employer' still has to pay some of those, the freelancer also does, unlike an employee, who does not
• freelancers only get unpaid leave — to take a month off and still have the same per annum, they would need to increase the invoices by 9% (to account for 11 rather than 12 months of actually working)

… Hence, comparing the totals on freelancers' invoices to 'naked' salaries of salaried employees for the same duration of a task is comparing apples to oranges, unless the freelancer is on an exclusive full-time (or non-exclusive significant part-time) contract with similar benefits to an employee.

You can't even subtract 'company expenses' from a year's worth of invoices and call it annual salary, let alone arriving at a monthly salary by dividing that by 12. This is because of the 'company' part, which — apart from actual costs and expenses — also include reserves and contingencies beyond what a salaried employee needs in private life.

More importantly, one can't — and that's the dumbest of all mistakes — just take a freelancer's invoice for a full day of work and multiply it by 365 and think that's how much the freelancer actually makes per annum! Nobody works 365 days! (And few people work 30-day months or 7-day weeks.)

See, a year has 52 weeks, which is 104 days off of the 365, then a variable number of public holidays and annual minimum paid leave that varies by country, from 0 in the USA to 38 in Austria and 52 in Iran, where a bit shy of 30 could be said to be the approximate intuitive average.

So it should be even more evident that one can't just say: 'An in-house counterpart makes 36.500 widgets a year, so we're going to pay you 300 widgets for three days of work,' and think that's sound logic, because it's not. 1/365 is a spending limit, not an earning target; even the greenest of all accountants or HR people should know the difference.

… And especially not when those days are longer than 8 hours each and an employee would be paid overtime in the same situation. For example, under Polish labour law 8 hours +4 hours overtime would add up to 15.5 standard hourly rates. Obviously, the very concept of recognizing overtime requires that 12 hours must be paid at least 12 hourly rates, not 8. This is normally absent from the per-project kind of contracts that freelancers usually work with.
 
To be on a level with salaried employees, a freelancer would have to work a maximum of 220–230 days a year and still make the same annual salary as salaried counterparts, increased by the kind of taxes and insurance contributions that self-employed people pay for themselves rather than having them paid by the employer, plus the value of whatever extra benefits salaried employees are getting that the freelancer is not, including overtime pay, and finally a sizeable extra to finance the 'freelancer' part, i.e. the fixed assets and overheads and other costs of the tiny 'home office' — computer, software, phone, increased utility bills, increased fuel consumption, occasional legal advice or litigation, the accountant's fees, marketing etc. — and some reserves and contingencies (such as replacing or repairing any broken equipment and being unable to work and earn money in the meantime).

Otherwise one simply needs to compare freelancers to solo traders and small-business owners. The  costs may be less than those of a solo firm or clinic, but the cost structure is still that of a solo practice and not that of a salaried employee.




Even if the freelancer in question functions more like a temporary worker, then there are still at least some costs associated with being self-employed that do not apply to salaried employees — and some benefits such workers don't receive while regular employees do, which means their respective wages are not directly comparable.

For starters, the idea of being a freelancer is not to work for the same money minus benefits, without paid leave and paying for your own equipment, unlike what some hopeful business geniuses seem to think.

A Reminder That Tenders and RFPs Are Not Good For You

Earlier today, when checking my mail, I clicked on a job notification from one of the largest translation portals, before I realized it had 'tender' in the job title.

Guess what I did?

I hit 'back'.

I just don't do tenders.

This is not to say that tenders can absolutely never be good for you, because that just wouldn't be true, at least not in that kind of extreme degree.

However, tenders are simply not designed to be profitable to you, or profitable to both parties, i.e. balanced.

Tenders were designed the way the are with the goal of maximizing the buyer's interest.

Look at what the buyer does if buying via RFPs. The buyer sits back in a fluffy armchair and sips his tea just as the sellers enter the arena and bleed their blood, sweat and tears into the sun-scorched sand. Himself, he doesn't have to lift a finger in order to get the entire benefit of negotiation, i.e. the full, maximum benefit of the bargain.

And, no part of the system usually provides for any return of costs even if you 'win'. Yes, you hear me right. Your 'prize' is the opportunity to sell your normal or slightly upgraded services for your normal or somewhat (heavily) discounted prices. There is nothing like paying you for the costs of processing the paperwork. No man-hours, no postage fees, no nothing. I'm talking about the 'winner' here, mind you, not the poor souls who 'lost'.

However, the poor souls who 'lost' may well be real winners in the end — they don't tie themselves up for months or years to come in what's a questionable deal from the beginning.

Chances are they will meet — and use — better opportunities in all that time.

Pretty much the only exception is when you are new to freelancing but not to translating, which means you don't have many clients yet and finding work is a problem but you do have the qualifications to win a tender without being the cheapest provider. Or when you have no alternatives, then it's basically a fact of life that you must reply to those RFPs and better not in vain, or you're going to starve. Or when you can benefit from price difference between the buyer's country and yours (possible if you live in a third-world country or even a second-world country like my own).

Like I said, the scope, the object of the tender is the provision of your services in the future, not the recovery of any costs you may have incurred in the past. The system is simply designed in such a way (which I might well say as a lawyer) that it doesn't give any specific thought to your cost or anything like that. It only gives thought to you not making any more profit than is absolutely inevitable.

Yes, you hear me right: The point of tenders and RFPs and all that is for you to not make any more profit than is absolutely unavoidable. The balance of the bargain is supposed to go over to the buyer, in whole.

That's the point of tenders.

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).

Rush Fees Are Legitimate

Essentially, there are two legitimate reasons for charging someone a price, just as there are two major types of pricing:

1. cost to provide, or harm or inconvenience sustained on the part of that someone (similar to cost plus pricing)
2. benefit created for that someone (value-based pricing, which does not necessarily involve manipulation of supply and demand)

For a more detailed picture see congestion pricing and relationship-based pricing.

Your costs are not only the bills you pay and the prices of equipment and software you use but also all expenditure, loss, detriment, inconvenience etc. suffered on behalf of your client, as well as opportunity costs, which means anything that you sacrifice in order to satisfy your client's needs or desires.

They include:

• lack of remaining capacity for other work, sometimes also on the day after (because you will be too tired to work — a small surcharge doesn't make it even)
• consequences of unavailability to your other current or prospective clients (new relationships not formed, existing relationships strained, substitute translators taking over)
• increased fatigue, exhaustion, loss of sleep, which, apart from being unpleasant, you just can't afford to repeat too frequently for fear of more serious complications
• loss of family time or time alone or private opportunities, including many things that don't even have a price tag on them (what's the price of not putting your child to sleep)
• sheer inconvenience of dropping everything and upsetting your plans

Your client's benefits include:

• ability — or increased ability or capacity — to reap the benefits of short-term opportunities by responding timely to them (e.g. time-limited bargains, RFPs/tenders with tight deadlines, certain types of commercial transactions)
• stronger image and better PR because of acting first or responding in time, decisively and proactively
• competitive advantage over those who can't or won't
• ability to avoid negative consequences (including long-term) of all kinds (not just purely financial but also image and goodwill) of failing to meet deadlines and schedules or respond to opportunities
• sheer convenience of jumping the queue

As you probably realize, your client's benefits mostly relate to commercial transactions and investments of which the goal is profit, not charity.

Transactions involve transaction costs: the costs of searching, negotiating and enforcing, all of which can require translation assistance. Translation is also part of investments, or an investment in itself, hence translation cost is investment cost, which means the necessary cost paid now for a greater profit in the future (which will not be shared with you).

Bottom line: translation fees are the result of your client's profit-making operation.

You can't have a French website without translating it into French any more than you could have apple jam without planting apple trees — or paying someone else to plant them for you. You can't just spend your last savings on an expensive car, you need to be able to afford fuel and insurance. You can't just buy machines, you need people to operate them. You can't just buy a building for a one-off price, there's upkeep to pay forever after.

Having to pay for translation — or faster translation than would normally be available — is not any more unfair than having to pay the cost of seedlings for plants, fuel for cars, phone bills, electricity costs, salaries of employees and everything else, including any applicable urgency surcharges.

The expected profit from your client's business transactions is not a holy birthright or human right that you should drop everything to help secure. It's an investment that depends on initial costs, a normal commercial profit, not a humanitarian cause.

A for-profit business enterprise looks quite silly expecting return without investment.

It also looks silly expecting you to be a partner in investment costs without making you a partner in investment returns.

By the way, have you noticed that nowhere here did you and I consider supply and demand, only costs and benefits?

Not that there would be anything wrong in using supply and demand to avoid being underpaid (railroaded into 'best rates') by manipulation of supply and demand to begin with!

Two Different Ways of Working With a Proofreader (and Pitfalls and Scams)

There are essentially two types of translator-proofreader relationships (other than role switching between double-hatting equals, i.e. two similarly qualified translators serving each other's second pair of eyes):

1. The proofreader, as the more experienced party, is also the reviewer, reviser and overall sort of supervisor responsible for the final quality of translation. (Proofreader ultimately responsible.)
2. The proofreader, as the less active party, with less exposure, is merely the translator's assistant, where the translator makes the final decisions. (Translator ultimately responsible.)

There are advantages and disadvantages to both models.

In #1 (dominant proofreader) the choice of proofreader/editor/reviser(/reviewer/supervisor) doubtless seems prudent, but coupled with the choice of rookier adepts of the profession to handle the core, substantive translation, it inevitably calls for the following question:

Why was the more qualified person not selected to do the translation in the first place?

And that question is spot on. Final quality was apparently looked on from the rear side, so to say. In other words, the decision-maker's focus was on assuring the best possible proofreading, which was commendable, of course, but it happened here at the expense of core translation, which was less commendable. Having the more highly qualified translator start from a clean slate would most probably have led to better results.

Agencies and clients may be tempted to adopt this model in order to achieve cheaply the same final quality of translation — they would think — as if the more expensive senior professional did it from scratch. Except they likely won't get it. The extent to which someone else's translation can be salvaged without being violated is limited. Revamping even a passable translation to make it excellent often takes more time that translating excellently from scratch. At half the price, naturally. Which is convenient to agencies but not to translators, of course.

Even if that exalted expert proofreader (or 'proofreader', as the job carries a lot more to it than its modest name would imply) actually did pursue his own quality standard, he would still need to make a lot of subjective changes that wouldn't go down well. He would be challenged for 'reversing' the translator without a good cause, charged with being whimsical and unable to justify his opinions and back them with evidence, or with being unfair to the translator whose work is being proofread, or with altering the vision of the translator whose name is put on the translation, who basically 'owns' it and thus his choices should command a certain measure of respect even if they aren't optimal.

On the other hand, in #2 (dominant translator) the proofreader's role is more reserved, more restricted, he stays in the background rather and acts as a typical QA link in the chain. Doing it that way should theoretically make sure that the translator's vision is not interfered with, his decisions aren't unfairly challenged and changed etc. However, if the translator's role is seen as more essential, then it's somewhat probable that a rookie will be chosen for the proofreader's billet. And that will mean a lot of silly questions for the translator to answer, a lot of errors flagged that aren't really errors but false positives — because the proofreader knows less than the translator does, he has to ask more questions and is more likely to be wrong.

Furthermore, where the proofreader (or editor or reviser) has less credibility than the translator, the translator is both free and somewhat tempted to just reject all changes off-handedly without justifying himself in detail. And that defeats the purpose of proofreading.

It's an 'either or' kind of situation: Either the translator ends up answering a lot of ignorant questions and even ignorant allegations of error in his work, or the proofreading ends up being more of a superficial pretence than reality, a rubber stamp to meet ISO requirements.

Neither model can be simply judged to be better or worse than the other, but what really leads to serious mess is when parts of the two models get mixed up, aggravating the problems that are already found in each basic model. For example:

1. Junior translators selected to be 'proofreaders' and editing, revising and reversing people who have more knowledge, experience and possibly talent than they do. That is — unsurprisingly — outright harmful to translation quality if they have the final say. On the other hand, at a risk of repeating myself, if they don't have the final say and their authority and credibility is low, then they'll end up being more of nuisance and smokescreen than anything to do with what proofreading and revising really is supposed to achieve.
   
2. More highly qualified translators who are relegated to a mostly passive and marginal proofreader role (in the dominant translator model) can't do much for quality — even if the quality is bad and badly in need of fixing. To still think that such proofreaders can somehow guarantee the same quality standard as if they were translating that same text from scratch would be a gross misunderstanding and an unfair situation to be in. And if they do retranslate entire passages (will they be paid properly for it or will they have to do it free of charge out of their sense of duty?), then someone else — a less qualified person? — will have to do the proofreading if the principle of two pairs of eyes is to be preserved.

You can't magically have the cake and eat it too by paying 50% or 33% of a great translator's normal rates to have him fix a 0.02 translator's work. You will NOT receive 100% of the quality for 80% of the price.

The cost of the kind of 'proofreading' that is in reality more of a rescue operation traditionally is a lot higher than the going rate of a simple cursory QA check that corresponds to 'proofreading' in the typical understanding of the word in English-speaking countries.

If you try to pay less, you expose yourself to the same risks as everybody else who tries to purchase goods or services for less than they are worth. Naturally, it gets worse when you try to buy at or especially below the vendor's cost-to-provide.

Obviously, even having the good translator's work proofread by an assistant with some language skills is preferable to not having it checked at all, by anyone. If you run an old-fashioned translation company with in-house translators, having a seasoned professional proofread, correct and educate the rookies is more than viable, it simply is the standard way of business. Those rookies later graduate and enter into supervisory roles themselves.

But quit thinking that you can somehow, magically, get top translator quality without paying for it.

Rather, think thoroughly and honestly about legitimate ways to optimize your costs without counting on a miracle to happen. For example work with fully professionally qualified full-time proofreaders who are not simply double-hatting translators but for whom proofreading and editing really is their calling. Pay a fixed salary rather than freelance rates. Use rookies for simple texts that they can handle with some supervision from a senior professional equipped with the final say and make it clear who is responsible for what. Or match senior, expert translators with 'assistants' to help spot the occasional missing comma, ambiguity or slip of style. But above all plan with the assumption of having to pay the full price of the quality level you want to achieve, whichever level of quality that is. Don't cut corners, it won't work.

Bottom line: you can't (i) achieve top translator quality by assigning a top translator to do the proofreading and a less qualified, cheaper translator to do the translation, and (ii) you can't really bring the quality of a good translator's work to a higher level by pairing him up with a less experienced or skilled proofreader.

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For translators: scam risk by certain agencies and clients:

To hire a more qualified translator to do the proofreading with the expectation of e.g. receiving 100% of the quality for 60% of the price is nothing new or merely theoretical. It's not even unreasonable from a purely economical point of view, a purely economical sort of rationality.

Since agencies and PMs don't sell their own time but rather earn their commission on thousands of such sales, the effect of scale makes all those two-cent savings here or there add up to much more substantial numbers that seem worth pursuing (even if they aren't really, compared to adopting a more sustainable and less corner-cutting business model).

Thus, in the broad market of today it is probably reasonable to be cautious with proof jobs and carefully check all the relevant factors before accepting such a job. Try to make it as clear as possible what standard of final quality your are supposed to achieve (or especially guarantee) within what budget. This includes finding out (i) whether you will be paid extra for extra work, as well as (ii) whether you will be required to do extra work for no extra pay if such a need should arise (which would mean the agency outsourcing the risk to you, which is a known and scientifically researched and optmized method of risk management for companies).

Next, agencies can exploit less experienced — and cheaper — translators by having them sign quality guarantees and indemnity clauses (hold harmless etc.), so that those translators can ultimately be required to pay a more expensive translator's bill when their own quality, surprise!, is not found sufficient. Often at the agency's 'sole discretion', as some of those churlish people dare actually write in their standard contracts. 

The above essentially means hiring a 20-cent translator at a 6-cent translator's expense. A beautiful business plan, isn't it?

It is the bigger, meaner cousin of dodging payment by hiring an inexperienced rookie whose work can later be challenged easily and penalties imposed to avoid payment.

Another trap for you lies in not knowing that you are supposed to achieve a particular standard with no editor, proofreader or reviser being hired as should be the case in a real, professional publishing process or in normal professional translation. As a result, you can be expected to pay the proofreader or editor's bill out of your own pocket.

Alternatively, you can just be told that there's no proofreader or editor, so you need to handle it all on your own — with no extra pay. And that too is a scam, essentially, though not of the same gravity. It's not actually fraud, it's just a tricky sort of extortion — if it even is that — or simply a bad deal.

You Don't Have To Do All They Ask (Or Buy What They Sell) To Be Professional

This is going to sound rather controversial and may ruffle some feathers, but:

you don't have to do all they ask.

Or, rather, you don't need to be available to do just about anything your current or potential client wants done — whether by someone, some translator, in general, or by you in particular.

Just like you don't have to enable precisely the kind of rates your potential clients want to pay, you don't have to enable service specifications — or service bundles — that they want.

For example, these days, if you go to the bank, you can probably pay some bills and even ask the bank to pay any future bills of the same kind for you, which means you don't need to remember about them any more. On the other hand, how many banks have you seen that will agree to handle just about everything for you in B2B, including accounting and salaries and everything else? Some banks get close, but only few of them.

And how many law firms will agree to include accounting, HR, PR, whatever else floats the client's boat? Some will, but by no means all of them.

So just why should you, as a translator, need to be available as a copyist, paralegal, all-purpose office gopher and concierge for the client's other needs? You don't have to.

If you do want to, then I think you still shouldn't anyway, but that's a discussion for another day.

The point here today is that you don't have to. Whether you want to (or not) is a whole different issue.

So don't take all those talking heads as messengers of truth revealed when they say that in order to be a professional in today's world you need to buy from translation and other office software companies.

The same companies which may well be sponsors of translation-related events, owners of translation agencies etc.

You don't need to buy their products — or the associated training courses and certifications — to be professional at what you do.

The same goes for agencies. It is in their interest to turn you into a one-stop shop to which they can outsource everything that needs to be done — and everything else which can possibly be done and which will sell and bring some profit margin — but in order to be a professional translator you really don't have to offer all those included or additional services that they are capable of thinking about.

Do you want some fries with your translation, sir?

Once More Unto The Breach: About Rates Again

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. For Harry, for IAPTI and for fair trade. I'm come here straight from reading a post at Audra's about setting your rates and about why that's important, on a quest to add my own two farthings as I'm always wont to do. Without further ado, here's some maths (and some facts) and some reassurance. First the numbers:

With an average salary of $53,410 per year, interpreters and translators earn less money than other social services professionals, such as clinical social workers ($51,460), middle school teachers ($56,280) and school psychologists ($72,220). However, the average salary of interpreters and translators is higher than that of exterminators ($32,190) and garbage collectors ($35,230).

Source: Money.usnews.com. Check out median hourly wage too. Buried somewhere in the archives of this blog is a post with more such data, including how translators in Western Europe make far less than the average for their education level, perhaps another referencing how translators earn less and less despite how demand for their work keeps increasing, and more. (Unless I forgot to write them. That sometimes happens.)

See, translators are already being impoverished as a result of the constant pressure on rates and a couple of other factors, such as the specific structure of our sector, and the way so many jobs get reverse-auctioned off by dominant buyers (even despite suppliers being in high demand, despite the good ones). This is what happens when a whole group of people massively gives in to nibbling demands and sometimes outright frog's leap bluff offers, which seemingly succeed through sheer insolence.

Whatever may seem okay right now — to survive as a graduate, to survive a job change, to do whatever — will it suffice to feed and clothe a family, send the children to college, keep some savings in the bank, do all sorts of things middle-class people are supposed to be able to do?

If you take $0.04 a word, you'll need to translate 1,335,250 words to make $53,410 p.a. That means 121,386 words a month if we take one month off due to holidays and sick leave (21-23 business days on both accounts is actually not that much). Supposing you don't work on weekends, let's divide this figure by 22 (the number of business days in a month). This results in 5518 words per day. How do you feel about translating that, every day? Supposing you work traditional 8-hour days, this also means 690 words an hour, consistently over 8 hours. A figure quite unrealistic in the case of most translators.

Things get better at six cents, but obviously still firmly in the unspectacular range as you can guess by now.

Bottom line: do some maths.

Now regarding the reassurance I promised you. I want to be crystal clear on one thing: While it's admirable to be the best at what you do, or try to get there, and always strive to improve, you still shouldn't need to be the best-in-class sort of  overachiever only in order to hope for reasonable, fair, sustainable wage commensurate with your education, experience and the value of your work.

Just because silver is not gold and gold is not platinum it doesn't stop being valuable and commanding a good price. On the other hand, if you really are there, you shouldn't have to struggle in the six-cent pool. Not six, not twelve, not thirty. Gold and platinum aren't priced in pennies.

A lot will be said about how market value does not coincide with emotions and feelings, and how market value should supposedly guide all things. Also about how translation needs to bring money on the table in order to justify serious money being paid for it.

The thing is, though, that translators are not actually being paid the real market value of their work, and that translation does bring money to translation buyers and users, and to resellers and intermediaries, it's only that at this day and age people don't see it fit to attribute that value to the translator's effort — for example because some other translator could produce the same value — or at least reward the translation financially in due proportion, because translation is supposedly an inherently low-value task. Both of which are silly propositions.

In truth interchangeability applies to everyone in business: plumbers, car mechanics, lawyers, accountants, marketers, consultants, executives, MBAs and everyone else, including the same people who use interchangeability as an argument to pay you peanuts. Plus, interchangeability does not cancel the value of your work, anyway, precisely because someone else would still have to do it.

Neither is a client or intermediary's perception of translation as a low-value sort of thing the sort of solid economic justification that they would demand of you (figuratively) in order to justify your pay.

The perception of translation deserving any more that pittance pay regardless of the whatever value it brings — that is something which goes against healthy principles of economy and even logic. That is a nonsense wish grounded in emotions rather than facts or principles.

The only thing about it which is consistent with the laws of economy is that in a buyer-controlled market buyers will be able to pull off that sort thing despite the irrationality of it. And especially in a market like the modern translation market, where the roles are reversed and translators are effectively buying their jobs rather than selling their services.

Not reassuring much, perhaps, but let's get the pseudoeconomic nonsense out of the way and be clear on who's trying to defy the laws of physics (economy, but anyway).

And just for the record, just in case, if someone claims that piecemeal work is to far removed from the final product or service to be priced in direct reference to it, then in such a case your costs of living, remuneration consistent with your education and the level of your contribution to the final product or service — those should all serve as referene in determining your pay, as long as the business sustains itself and brings profit. Not however little someone thinks he should be able to pay you. That's more like laws of the jungle than healthy laws of economy.

(And this even before we consider the damage done by low rates to the quality of translation and the resulting damage to clients, and all the promises made and broken on which the clients relied in paying for the service, which prevent supply-demand mechanics from working properly due to the misinformation.)

Don't Outsource, Raise Your Fees

(The inspiration for writing this came from seeing a snapshot from Gary Smith's IAPTI presentation at Rose Newell's Twitter, but I've dealt with the subject before on this blog.)

In a limited, narrow perspective, it may seem to you that in taking jobs from clients and handing them out to your colleagues in exchange for a cut (e.g. 20%) you're helping them fill their calendars and make a living. And that's not quite wrong, actually.

On the other hand, for all the freelancing ups and downs, there is still a natural path of progress. Your job title may never change, but you gain experience levels just like your old WoW character. You move up. Others fill the place you left.

When you outsource, you don't move up, and others don't fill your place. You're stuck where you are, and others are stuck as your invisible henchmen instead of advancing their own careers.

Either do it right — and start a translation company (in which you can still translate if you want to) — or move up and free up your previous place for others.

It won't necessarily be your designated pals who get the free spot if you just simply raise your rates, but in the broader perspective the market will come to realize that the most wanted translators are an asset to compete for and reward fittingly.

The increased price and publicity will take care of the selection process on both sides: yours and the clients'. Yes, some prospects will no longer be able to afford your services. However, they can still choose from among your many colleagues who may very well be up to the task, not even necessarily being worse translators than you are but perhaps less successful economically.

With the emergence of a visible, easily distinguishable echelon of the most wanted translators, clients who have the resources but can't or don't want to gamble or experiment would know where to go and wouldn't need to burn their fingers cycling through one million seemingly identical but randomly qualified translators or rely on intermediaries to fish in a flat pool of all skill levels mixed up.

Nor will translation buyers continue to believe that for a measly six or twelve or twenty cents per word they deserve world-class quality generated by the unique combination of rare personal talent, many years of dedicated study, rich and varied or close and focused long-term experience and — in some cases — overall brilliance.

If you want to make more money, start an official agency and command fees in the proper agency range. Or change a separate management fee above the counter. Or take normal editing jobs that may well pay better than a 10% cut for editing your sidekicks. Or, well, just raise your rates already and either make more in the same time or make the same in less time.

If you want to help your sidekicks, you'll help them more by introducing them as your designated successors to the clients you leave behind than by signing their work at 50-80% of your old fees. They will be making more and building their own name.

Even the client will benefit from being directly in touch now with the person who's de facto been doing that client's jobs for a while.

Related articles:
Freelance Outsourcing: Make it (Semi-)Official or Don't Do It (longer treatment of the same subject)
Don't Flatten the Quality Scale (we should quit pretending that only the best is ever adequate in terms of translation quality — this includes handing clients down to less established but still adequate colleagues according to what a client is ready to pay)

Translator-to-Translator Marketing

The idea came in the form of inspiration from the title of this thing by Tom Kane popping up in my reading list. I'm not even reading it before writing this.

In short, we don't always market to professions. In fact, we often market to semi-professionals and to outright layfolks, sometimes outright ignorants who not only lack the knowledge but don't care to think logically and get some conclusions on the basis of the general knowledge and common sense that everybody has or should have (which does include a lot of PMs these days).

Translator-to-translator marketing is not what you'd normally associate with marketing, largely because the people involved are typically friends or at least acquaintances. Only in rare situations will you end up talking to an agency owner or project manager who actually does happen to be a translator (which doesn't actually always guarantee a certain desirable modicum of common sense and professionalism).

Those guys will be your friends, your acquaintances, your classmates, and everybody else you meet while procrastinating or sharing your misery in this masochistic profession with others.

Those guys know what they are talking about. Usually. And most of the time they know better than the usual layman anyway.

If they work, or have in the past worked, in your own pairs and fields, then chances are they are in a position to form a judgement of the quality of your work. If you have worked together on some projects before, they are likely to know whether you are reliable or not or if one can get along with you better or worse. Or what the clients, PMs and others said about your work.

Finally, people who always end up in the same forum and Facebook discussions with you generally know something about you, such as whether you seem to be a smart person, or conscientious, whether your suggestions to others seem sound, whether you can structure an argument logically in a foreign language or actually struggle with understanding what people say to you in your own (at least before you hit the reply button). They may remember the stories you share, and the sentiments.

Working with them — or through them — is similar to referrals from previous clients. They should also be treated accordingly, as just because you're friends doesn't mean the job is any less demanding (itself or, say, its deadline or some other important characteristics that go beyond the text itself). Thanking them and making sure they aren't embarrassed in the end by having recommended you is basic courtesy that I shouldn't normally need to be mentioning.

Don't neglect fellow translators as a potential source of jobs — they are rarely the ultimate source, and if they are then they typically don't have deep pockets, but from time to time they are in a position to co-opt colleagues or recommend substitutes. If you've been around for a longer while, you will know.

Fellow translators know you. Make sure you take this factor into account.

Finally, those can some of your best jobs. A fellow translator in a position of power can prevent the client from making unreasonable demands or asking silly questions and effectively doubling your work time without compensating you accordingly. He or she may also be able to negotiate better pay, nicer deadlines and some other conditions that generally put you in the premium league as opposed to the typical struggling-to-get-along situation.

Take care of your image inside your own circles.

As for the how-to, you are finally talking to people who understand what you're talking about — usually — so it should come to you more or less intuitively. I'm not encouraging any sort of solicitation among your remote acquaintances, unless there is some sort of mutual consent to helping each other out and a general will to learn about each other's practice, as is sometimes the case in networking. But the most beautiful thing is that in this you don't need to wonder how to reach people who don't know or care what you're talking about. So this is most of all a casual, everyday opportunity that you shouldn't waste.

You're already on the right path if your reputation grows, if your expertise is widely known, if people listen to what you say and you generally say things that are worth listening to or reading. And if you don't do anything particularly silly to estrange them — unlike in consumer or consumer-like relationships, even eccentric weirdos are respected for their competence within their own circles as long as they're good at what they do.

Freelance Outsourcing: Make it (Semi-)Official or Don't Do It

Sometimes it's easier to take on more work and to start outsourcing the excessive workload than it is to raise one's own rates.

However, in the interest of the entire profession translators who are more in demand should raise their rates and allow their colleagues to raise theirs.

Freelancing is a form of business in which it is easy to forget about progress. There is no natural path of advancement, and there can be very little in the way of career progression unless the steps up are triggered — actively claimed and proclaimed — by the translator. 

Just like of the employees of a stagnant company, if you don't ask for a raise or promotion, you won't get it.

Namely, as a freelance translator, you're always 'Translator' forever, getting paid the same rates unless you raise them.

This can make you think that starting an agency to leverage the work of others is the only way to improve your fate. It's not.

Alternatively, you may just simply find yourself swarmed, permanently or periodically (which is more common) with work you can't or don't want to refuse. And that means you need help, you need another pair of hands. Right? Wrong!

Or rather that's surely a way, but there is also another way.

You can just simply raise your rates! Your colleagues will still end up handling the work you can't do because you only have two hands and the day has only 24 hours, but they will be doing it in their own name, dealing directly with the client and possibly getting paid higher rates.

And whichever clients initially balk at your now-higher rates may soon come over once they see how much they 'save' by working with someone cheaper. Or training a new person. Is this blackmail? No! Your value increases in proportion to your skill and how you know the client's company. You deserve a raise for that.

If you think your client won't understand, you're perhaps judging the client too harshly, too early. Give the client a chance.

Besides, handing stagnant clients down to a translator who is perhaps now just as skilled as you were when you started working for the client who won't pay you more after, say, five years, is gentler than just simply terminating them. As a wake up call you can still leave that client your updated rate sheet or offer to do proofreading, editing or revising for a reasonable fee — with a loyalty discount if you want to grant one to your old client.

If you actually like outsourcing and managing and organising — and have gained an understanding of business (notably your clients' business) in the course of your translation work — how about starting an agency? You can still translate or act as a proofreader, editor, reviser, co-ordinator or some other QA person to make sure your clients get the quality they're used to.

Outsourcing without being an agency is a bit more complicated.

Hybrids, as Patent Translator dubs them, do just that — on condition that they openly act as outsourcers, i.e. communicate it to the client in clear terms that the job will be outsourced.

It's not my business if the client agrees and especially if the outsourcing translator does the QA, but ghost translating shouldn't be considered as a serious option. It can even bite back, notably when a nameless translator manages to botch the work which went out in your name.

But the great masters had apprentices, didn't they?

You could cite the example of the painters and sculptors of old, but everybody knew that they had a workshop, pretty much because it was a crowded place full of kings' and lords' envoys and everybody want to put a son there.

And the work cost more if the master added more than just a finishing touch.

At least in theory, and in the beginning, masters were masters and didn't hire other masters, they oversaw a small herd of apprentices and pupils. Translators can do that too, it's called mentoring.

Later, of course, masters started to inherit their positions and talented outsiders started being barred. Or forced to do work the powerful master could sign and sell as his own. Let's not have that in translation.

Besides, if you want to be a master — which is not a bad idea, actually — claim a master's fees. Raise your profile so that your students possibly get more reputation from your name than the clients'. And so that you don't have to manage a barnful of apprentices free of charge. Ugh!

Is it Josh or is it Kate?

Since a freelance translator's clients don't communicate with each other, they don't know how much work leaves that translator's mailbox. They don't know if it's 5000 words a day (plausible) or 10,000 (possible) or 20,000 (extremely unlikely) or some obscene number.

Consequently, they may think they work with Josh personally at all times where in reality they're working with John, Kate or Sally, depending at each time on which of them really gets to do it.

It's true that John, Kate and Sally are happy because they have work, and perhaps even the referrals they get from Josh are more valuable than referrals from unknown clients. So I'm not saying this is unfair on these grounds. But the system isn't really optimal.

For starts, either Josh does QA free of charge, or accepts risks to his reputation, or he pays them less than he gets from the client, in order to make some markup for the trouble of managing the whole operation.

How about the client paying Josh for that instead, and paying John, Kate and Sally a full rate? And giving everybody a normal referral, including a special one for the supervisor?

This is especially true in agency-translator relationships where there's a ceiling on the rates and all sorts of translators with varying qualifications may be paid in the same bracket.

This means John, Kate and Sally may well swap places with Josh at other times! In which case the first one to land the job will get some markup and the rest a reduced rate, or the first one to claim the job will end up doing QA free of charge.

This is clearly not optimal unless we're talking about a mentoring relationship.

So start a team or agency, or outsource officially, or just simply raise your rates.

If you just simply raise your rates, you as the more wanted translator (or simply the first translator on the job) will earn more, the less wanted translator will also get to earn more (as opposed to taking a cut to make room for the colleague's markup), and the client will have a choice.

If you don't want to raise your rates, that's fine, too, but again, do it officially, openly, or just facilitate contacts.

If you feel that raising your rates would be greedy, consider raising them just so that your less established or less wanted colleagues also can. Go up to allow someone else to go up, instead of keeping the place and keeping the rates low.

Alternatively, just like a rookie, you can raise rates for commercial clients and do pro bono work for charities. We'll explore this angle in more detail in a second.

Just basically don't make your superior work available at cheap rates so that normal work holds no value.

More experienced translators need to make more so that less experienced translators can make something.

Back to the beginning

This is similar to my suggestion that newbie translators who need experience shouldn't flood the market with cheap human translation but:

1. charge more from normal commercial clients (including translation companies and agencies)
   and, at the same time:
   
2. gain your much-needed experience working for charities and NGOs free of charge. 

For example, if you translate 30,000 words per month at €0.06 per word, you will end up making €1800 and translating 30,000 words per month.

Alternatively, you can charge €0.03 per word, translate 60,000 words and make €1800.

It seems you have to choose between rates and experience. But it only seems so!

Because 30,000 words at €0.06 per word for €1800 monthly + 30,000 words at €0 per word for €0 = 60,000 words and 1800 euros a month.

This means you still end up doing 60,000 words and taking home 1800 euros a month, but you still get to keep the higher rate for business clients in place. There is thus no bottom feeding.

And your work gains a higher profile because you do higher-priced commercial work — since you don't depend on (only) commercial work for experience — and get the benefit of working with NGOs, engaging in pro bono causes, making connections from which paid work sometimes results. And perhaps your business clients feel like they're supporting your significant pro bono operation when they pay you good rates.

Plus, with NGOs it should be far easier to specialize and certainly easier to gain exposure and build your name. An agency has no need to slap a non-competition clause on you or gag you into silence about that work you did for it, especially if that's not about any real secrets but only about denying you the benefit of the client's name and logo in your portfolio.

I'm not trying to corrupt you here and take the charity spirit away from your charitable work while giving you a cynical outlook. But the numbers do add up here, and the charities still get to benefit from your work without needing to part with money or anything else.

Just perhaps be honest with yourself and realize the difference between purely charitable work and the kind of charitable work which is written into a for-profit business model. And in the latter the NGO's names and logos in your portfolio can play a significant role.

Still feel bad? So just tell your clients like it is, right on your own page, that you've chosen to gain your experience from NGOs instead of lowering your rates for normal, commercial clients, and that this is benefitting you financially when you get business from the valuable NGO referrals. At which point I can't really see what would be dishonest or unfair or even dirty here.

By the way, if you put heaps of €0 pro bono work on your website, you may actually attract high-paying clients with that or convince existing clients or prospects to pay more. With heaps of €0.03 work you can't! Rather, they'll want discounts.

Okay, so what's the point of this here? The point is that pretty much the same principle applies to experienced translators. Donate your time to charities directly instead of donating it to commercial clients indirectly through low rates. (Which is what happens when you outsource unofficially within your own standard rates unless you find some sort of sweet spot such as when you pay a student a good rate and the difference between his rate and your rate, which you keep, will make a comfortable payment for any post-editing you do. And the client still gets your quality instead of student quality, of course.)