A Price That Matches Both Your Needs & That of The Market

What Does It Mean to Choose a Price?

Price, in translation as in other fields, is the heart of the matter. However, don’t think that there is a standard price on the market and that it is enough to position yourself in relation to it.

It’s up to you to know what your price is: it must suit your needs, correspond to the services you provide, and be in line with the prices charged by your competitors in the translation market! In a nutshell, there is no one-size-fits-all answer.

At first glance, this may seem complicated, but we’ll break it down for you.

How to Develop Your Pricing Strategy?

Firstly, a price must be determined on the basis of concrete criteria. When you receive a translation project, begin with in-depth analysis.

– What is the source language?

As you can guess, you won’t charge the same amount if you translate from Spanish or Japanese.

– How many words does the text contain?

Yes, most often the number of words is used as the reference figure to calculate your price. There is nothing to prevent you from choosing another, less common solution. On average, the price per word is between €0.10 and €0.30 depending on the rarity of the language combination.

– What is the area of expertise and complexity of the text?

It is obvious that you don’t spend the same amount of time translating a highly technical legal text as you would on a recipe (although the question of an unknown Chinese dish is still open to debate), so it is necessary to take this into account. If you’re doing transcreation, the number of words is not necessarily very high, but the time spent can be substantial because of the creativity that this type of text requires.

– What are the client’s requirements (deadlines, subsequent changes)?

If your client calls you at 10pm in the evening for a 3,000-word translation to be delivered the next day, don’t hesitate to add a substantial surcharge to your estimate. If they ask you to modify your work by adding instructions that were not initially announced, so you should also charge them. These are time-consuming constraints. So be professional and help your client, but don’t forget that when it comes to billing…

Should You Take CAT Tools into Account?

Do you use CAT Tools for your translation work? You’re right to do so! However, this may have an impact on the price of your services. If you are familiar with CAT Tools, you should know that your clients are too. Some of them will not hesitate to ask you to include repetitions in your price, which means not being paid if a sentence appears a second time. Yes, even our beloved tools sometimes deceive us!

Your client can also provide you with a translation memory (i.e. a document containing a corpus of texts in the source language and their translation into the target language) containing texts close to the one you have to translate. Thus, by using software such as Trados Studio to translate your text and linking it to the translation memory, you can retrieve an accurate report of the translations already in the translation memory in just a few minutes. This way, your rate can be adjusted according to the sentence (more precisely, segments). To give you an idea, a 100% match could be charged 0, a fuzzy match below 75% could be charged at full rate and a fuzzy match at 80% could be charged at half rate. These figures are given as examples and vary according to the client.

It may sound frustrating when you put it like that, but think of the time you will save. You will be paid less for this project, but thanks to the translation memory, you will be able to translate so many more words per day, which means more projects. On average, a translator can process 2000 words per day. With these tools, this number can increase drastically!

So far, we have only talked about translation memories provided by clients. The good news is that you can also create them yourself. You can create them by domain or by client and get the most relevant translation proposals for your needs. This way, your prices will not be discounted and you will only benefit from these tools. There is also another possibility, you can also lower your prices by yourself to convince new clients or to keep those you work with regularly.

Conclusion

Don’t forget that your work has value, you have know-how that an automatic translator will never have. So make the most of your work, promote your skills to your clients and provide estimates at the right price!

Make it clear that while doing a job quickly and badly is indeed cheaper, quality work requires more time, skills and therefore money. On the other hand, poor quality work could end up being more expensive for your client, as the damage in terms of image can be considerable depending on the importance of the document.

Of course, we could have gone into even more detail on this subject, but we have chosen to focus on what we consider to be the most important concepts. By now you know that writing estimates is an integral part of your job as a translator and is not to be taken lightly. So, add value to your work with well-written estimates!

JN FRITZ