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Another tactic...
May. 24th, 2012 07:48 amThe day before yesterday, I highlighted how a promise to pay on receipt is far and away an insufficient quid pro quo to agree to give a client what amounts to a 20% discount on one's normal rate. Overnight, it occurred to me that there is another, even more onerous negotiating ploy that translators face: asking a translator to discount his or her rate because of the large size of the job.
The problem with dropping one's rate in order to get one's mitts on a sizeable job is that there is no economy of scale in translation (other things being equal). It takes basically twice as long to translate 1,000 words as it does to translate 500. There can be mitigating factors, such as the presence of repetitive boilerplate, or the fact that the pace will pick up once one "finds one's legs" with the terminology, but basically a word is a word is a word.
Which means that the only reason for heavily discounting one's rate—either in exchange for a promise to pay on receipt or for a sizeable job to work on—is the fact that you need the work to keep the wolf from the door.
That's a hard position to argue against—heck, I've worked at discounted rates when times have been slow—but one thing is for sure: if all you end up doing is working at a steep discount pretty much all the time, then maybe you're in the wrong business.
Perhaps the worst case of this kind of scenario is the job that promises a lot of work over a long term, but only if you work at less than your accustomed rate. That kind of commitment pretty much condemns you to working at said discount for as long as the project lasts, leaving you little or no time to develop outside clients (because you have to work longer to make the same income). And when the job does end (and they all do, eventually), things immediately get pretty lean until you find new work, which is a circumstance that's very conducive to accepting more work at a steep discount again. It's something of a vicious cycle.
On the contrary, what you want to be able to do—from time to time—is experiment with pushing your rate up, with the idea that any loss in revenue (due to lost volume) is made up by the revenue from the higher rate derived from the volume that's left. (If you bump your rate up by 33% and lose 25% of your volume because of it, you've broken even, but with more time available to market to new clients... or goof off, if that's your pleasure!) A friend of mine who works in Czech and English is a past master at this tactic, and I've put it to good use as well (though a bit more conservatively).
Cheers...
The problem with dropping one's rate in order to get one's mitts on a sizeable job is that there is no economy of scale in translation (other things being equal). It takes basically twice as long to translate 1,000 words as it does to translate 500. There can be mitigating factors, such as the presence of repetitive boilerplate, or the fact that the pace will pick up once one "finds one's legs" with the terminology, but basically a word is a word is a word.
Which means that the only reason for heavily discounting one's rate—either in exchange for a promise to pay on receipt or for a sizeable job to work on—is the fact that you need the work to keep the wolf from the door.
That's a hard position to argue against—heck, I've worked at discounted rates when times have been slow—but one thing is for sure: if all you end up doing is working at a steep discount pretty much all the time, then maybe you're in the wrong business.
Perhaps the worst case of this kind of scenario is the job that promises a lot of work over a long term, but only if you work at less than your accustomed rate. That kind of commitment pretty much condemns you to working at said discount for as long as the project lasts, leaving you little or no time to develop outside clients (because you have to work longer to make the same income). And when the job does end (and they all do, eventually), things immediately get pretty lean until you find new work, which is a circumstance that's very conducive to accepting more work at a steep discount again. It's something of a vicious cycle.
On the contrary, what you want to be able to do—from time to time—is experiment with pushing your rate up, with the idea that any loss in revenue (due to lost volume) is made up by the revenue from the higher rate derived from the volume that's left. (If you bump your rate up by 33% and lose 25% of your volume because of it, you've broken even, but with more time available to market to new clients... or goof off, if that's your pleasure!) A friend of mine who works in Czech and English is a past master at this tactic, and I've put it to good use as well (though a bit more conservatively).
Cheers...
