Beds and rates...
Dec. 5th, 2005 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpWhen I got back from the MCC this morning, there were piles of mattresses in the parking lot, and I was too slow to realize that the hotel was replacing all of the mattresses in all rooms, including mine. Fortunately - or not - I had to go visit one of our tenants whose heater had quit, so I was able to give the hotel some time to replace the mattress before I headed back to go to sleep.
Silly me, of course they hadn't finished by the time I got back!
Anyway, my old mattress is now back on the box spring, and I am seriously contemplating hitting the sack here shortly.
* * * One phrase that makes my blood run cold is a request by a translation company for me to come up with my "best price," typically based on some humongous volume of promised work. I've come to associate requests for that elusive "best price" as requests for laughably low rates that represent huge discounts from what one might normally charge.
I'll say it again: translation does not benefit from "economy of scale." Generally speaking, translating twice the words takes twice the time and it takes as much effort to compose a sentence when you are being paid n cents per word as if does to compose that sentence when you are being paid 2n cents each for those same words. Therefore, in my opinion, discounted rates are to be measured in percentages maxing out in the vicinity of 10%, and then only for truly remarkable amounts of work.
Happily, though, one company that had asked for my "best rate" called me this morning, and responded quite reasonably when I quoted my standard rate. Another company that had inquired about that same rate is, I am told, in something of a bind where they are probably going to have to engage any and all Russian-to-English translators to make an insane deadline on an insane volume of text. I sent them an email quoting my standard rate, but have not heard anything back yet.
Then there is the client I mentioned the other day, who today sent me a lengthy job and well and truly had les couilles to ask me if I'd be willing to accept payment on the basis of the source word count instead of the customary target count. I suggested that I'd be happy to do so if they raised the per-word charge by 20% to account for expansion, which would give them the ability to know in advance how much a document would cost to translate (ostensibly the reason for this change in policy), though frankly it would still leave me a bit on the short end of the stick in cases where the expansion actually exceeded 20% (most of the time, I suspect).
Call it experience, but I didn't think I was risking anything by going more than halfway to meet the client in this instance, because the answer was predictably uncompromising: sorry, we're offering the same work at the same rate per word, only we intend to pay you significantly less because we are basing payment on a significantly smaller word count. Are any concessions being offered to the poor translator, such as longer deadlines? Nope.
As you might expect, I am not doing this assignment at a 20% discount, either now or in the future.
As I'm typing this, the Outpost firewall is logging port scans at a rate of about one per minute, so I better post this and get offline, so that whoever is screwing around can go bother someone else.
Cheers..
Silly me, of course they hadn't finished by the time I got back!
Anyway, my old mattress is now back on the box spring, and I am seriously contemplating hitting the sack here shortly.
I'll say it again: translation does not benefit from "economy of scale." Generally speaking, translating twice the words takes twice the time and it takes as much effort to compose a sentence when you are being paid n cents per word as if does to compose that sentence when you are being paid 2n cents each for those same words. Therefore, in my opinion, discounted rates are to be measured in percentages maxing out in the vicinity of 10%, and then only for truly remarkable amounts of work.
Happily, though, one company that had asked for my "best rate" called me this morning, and responded quite reasonably when I quoted my standard rate. Another company that had inquired about that same rate is, I am told, in something of a bind where they are probably going to have to engage any and all Russian-to-English translators to make an insane deadline on an insane volume of text. I sent them an email quoting my standard rate, but have not heard anything back yet.
Then there is the client I mentioned the other day, who today sent me a lengthy job and well and truly had les couilles to ask me if I'd be willing to accept payment on the basis of the source word count instead of the customary target count. I suggested that I'd be happy to do so if they raised the per-word charge by 20% to account for expansion, which would give them the ability to know in advance how much a document would cost to translate (ostensibly the reason for this change in policy), though frankly it would still leave me a bit on the short end of the stick in cases where the expansion actually exceeded 20% (most of the time, I suspect).
Call it experience, but I didn't think I was risking anything by going more than halfway to meet the client in this instance, because the answer was predictably uncompromising: sorry, we're offering the same work at the same rate per word, only we intend to pay you significantly less because we are basing payment on a significantly smaller word count. Are any concessions being offered to the poor translator, such as longer deadlines? Nope.
As you might expect, I am not doing this assignment at a 20% discount, either now or in the future.
As I'm typing this, the Outpost firewall is logging port scans at a rate of about one per minute, so I better post this and get offline, so that whoever is screwing around can go bother someone else.
Cheers..
