Translator rates calculator

Lienka77 wrote:

I find it very difficult to decide what price I should ask per word or per hour. I (and so do my customers) am used to be paid by standard page (1800 characters including spaces). Depending on the nature of the text, I can translate 5-10 pages per day. None of my colleagues in my country uses this kind of rate, so would you help, please?

Gabriela Hebin wrote:

Please, just look at the default values on this formula.

A newbie translator might see this formula and expect to support his/her family's lifestyle by translating during only 70% of their "working" time, yet expects to do so by only translating 300 words per hour. Of course he/she feels it is perfectly reasonable to expect 4 weeks a year of what amounts to a paid vacation, and then to only work for 3 hours a day, 3 days a week.

Hello??? ON WHAT PLANET can you support yourself working 3 hours a day, 3 days a week, 48 weeks a year, if you're only good enough to produce 300 words an hour?

THEN someone else chimes in agreeing that they can only manage to produce some 1000-1200 words per day, so the newbie feels justified in the presumptions.

REALITY CHECK: 1000 words per day is NOT a professional rate of production! All of the translators who I work with can produce a minimum of 4000 words per day, some of them up to 8000, so let's get real here. Step it up.

What is the amount that you are willing to earn while you sit at home in front of your lapton in your jammies?
What is the value of being able to watch your own children rather than send them off to be "cared for" by strangers?
How cool is it to be able to take a break from your emails to move your laundry from the washer to the dryer?
Or to water your garden between assignments?
What is the value of NOT having to wear a suit and tie (or nylons and heels)?
Of NOT having to commute X number of hours each week?
Of NOT having to waste the the gas and wear and tear on your car?
How amazing is it to be in touch with people from all over the world and not have to sit in some fluorescent-lit office listening to some yahoo spouting the usual office gossip and politics while you pretend to care?
And what could be better than to avoid ALL of those things and still earn MANY times more than what an office worker earns?

To me, that kind of freedom is priceless.

Please enlighten me, even in the most Socialist of societies, since when does 300 words per hour X 3 hours a day X 3 days a week constitute an effort to earn a living? A business owner always works MORE than a full-time employee, not less. Greater freedom only comes with greater responsibility.

Enough said.

I'm sure this post will create hate mail, but so what? I'm sitting at home making my own coffee and listening to the TV while I laugh at the flames from the newbies who can only translate 1000 words per day.

hsnava wrote:

Although this post is not recent, I would still like to comment. I think 8000 words per day is a crazy number. I worked at a translation agency for about three years and there are only a handful of translators who would accept that volume. In fact, I think I have never even dared to ask a translator to do 8000 words in one day. As far as I'm concerned, it's not possible or I would seriously doubt of the quality of such translation.

Tony M wrote:


Well, I've always thought the generally German etc. way of charging per page / per line was rather odd, but is of course a relic of the olden days of typed documents with monospaced fonts in a very limited range of sizes. It seems to me this way of costing jobs is way behind the times these days, and with word processors in almost universal use, a word count is nowadays probably the easiest and fairest to implement (though I do have one publisher customer who works on a character count — which suits me just fine, as they always have lots of long words )

Alex Kalani wrote:

everyone is good in what they do in their native language.

Christian Esquivel wrote:

Łukasz Gos-Furmankiewicz wrote:



It's possible to get 10,000 and more (although less so to sustain that rate), but you need some really serious language competence, ease of writing, fast typing, a familiar subject and a proofer. Language competence, familiarity with the subject field (a product of knowledge and experience), and typing speed make a lot of difference.



Poland still operates on the standard page, save for most CAT work. (Speaking of which, CAT character counts exclude more than just spaces. Be careful about that. There's a 15% loss compared to text editor character counts.)

I don't trust word counts. I've worked in litigation. I know how easy it is to dispute the definition of a word, and then stall, stall, stall. Far easier to agree on something that ultimately comes down to byte size after saving to pure .txt. Divided by 1800, charged per-byte, whatever suits you.

A good thing about word count is that it deals away with complaints based on the fact that a shorter word could plausibly have been used instead.