9 Issues To Consider for Effectively Handling Payment For Small Translation Jobs

1. Freelance translators charge per word basis. This is the general rule. Some people charge per line basis. Some charge per 1000 words. In some cases people charge per page basis although it needs to be settled at the beginning how many words are there in a page. 2. Charging per page is not a good idea for freelance translators. More so, when one does not have any idea how the page shall look likes. You may expect 300-400 words but the actual page contains 600 words and you are a loser. So it is always good to charge per word basis. It does not matter whether you charge per word or per thousand words. 3. This is true for say 1000 words and more. But suppose you have a file containing 100 words, do you continue to charge per word basis? 4. For small jobs translators charge a minimum (eg. less than 300 words). Often, the client may say, complete a few small jobs and then add up the words and then charge. This is beneficial for clients but not for translators. Smaller jobs take more time to complete, so always treat each small job as a separate job and charge as per your minimum fees. You can do several small jobs for a client over the month and invoice the whole lot together but apply your minimum rate. Some client can lure you by telling that there would be small jobs on a regular basis. That's fine, but insist always to be paid as per minimal rate for small jobs. 5. Minimum payment is almost a standard today worldwide and it does make real sense. While it may be only say just 29 words in one case and 129 in another case, you nevertheless need to set up everything, make glossary, consult dictionary, conduct some research, etc., so there is considerable amount of effort involved on translators part. And this effort is compensated by the minimum charge. 6. Often you client may refuse to pay a minimum charge saying that their client does not pay them on minimum charge basis. This is a very bad logic; you as a translator have been hired by the agency and not by the client directly. So it is up to the agency to take care of this. 7. Remember also that there could be situations when charging per word basis or minimum can be very tricky, as the translator might work more than he actually translates, for example when the document is big and has lost of already translated words, but the translator is required to go through the whole document. It takes lots of time and energy. These are such jobs, which take your time but do not compensate you adequately. In such case add some percentage to you minimum charge to get compensated for your time and energy. 8. Are there situations when you need to adopt a different approach for charging minimum fees? Yes, there are such situations as well. Suppose you have developed a very good working relation with an agency who sends you jobs regularly and pay you well. They also send you small jobs at regular intervals. In this case as a translator you can take a different approach for charging minimum fees, rather than charging or lowering your minimum fee you can charge your regular minimum fees every second or third time, depending on the number of words. 9. So far we have talked about minimum charge for translation. Similarly the same rule could be applied for a minimum fees for other activities like proofreading etc. Some people prefer to set a fee per working hour when they do proofreading. ---------------------------------------------------- Want more direct clients? join my yahoo group. I will alert you when there is new tip posted in my blog. To subscribe just send a blank email at TipsforTranslators-subscribe@yahoogroups.com --------------------------------------------------- ____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better Heartthrob. Get better relationship answers from someone who knows. Yahoo! Answers - Check it out. http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396545433