Volume discounts
One question that often comes up among freelance translators is whether we should give volume discounts. I'm not against giving them in principle, but I think that we need to weigh the pros and cons of doing so.
Crossed purposes
Often agencies will ask for rather large volume discounts — larger than translators are willing to give. A big reason for this is that the interests of translators and translation agencies aren't aligned. The marginal cost of production falls much more rapidly for the agency than for the translator. Although they do have to proof, edit, and (in some cases) DTP your work, a large proportion of the agency's costs are fixed: salaries, sales, marketing, rent, … Selling 200 pages of translation isn't much more costly to the agency than selling 100 pages.
Big jobs greatly increase the profit margin of the agency, and thus they're often willing to offer a hefty discount to get them. The agency has then got to turn around and convince the translator to accept this discount.
Ramp-up time and familiarization
The marginal costs for the translator also decrease with volume. I think most translators will agree that doing five 1,000-word jobs will take more time, on average, than one 5,000-word job. For me, it's because it takes me a little time to get my head into a particular job, and with five different jobs I've got to switch gears five times. There's also the terminology issue: I usually have fewer and fewer terms to research/come up with good translations for as the job goes on.
On the longer job, my translation will also tend to be better. This is because I get a better picture of what the document is saying; when terms are used more often, or the technology is described in more detail, I have a better chance of being accurate with my translation.
But although my output does increase with larger jobs, it still takes more time (i.e. costs more) to do 200 pages than 100. This might be worth a discount, but generally not the really steep ones that some agencies ask for.
Discount or surcharge
Because of the benefits of longer jobs, I'd prefer getting more large jobs and fewer small ones. As a translator, I'd prefer doing this by charging a surcharge for smaller jobs. But of course, clients never like to pay surcharges, and love to get discounts. So why not turn it around: charge what you consider a decent rate for large jobs, and a commensurately higher rate for small ones — but tell the client that the small-job rate is your normal rate, and the volume rate is your discounted rate.
On the other hand, if the client wants discounts for matches in a TM, then in my view the volume discount goes out the window. It's either one or the other.
What you can get away with
As is almost always the case with business (and as freelance translators, we are in business), it's not a matter of what's fair, but a matter of what you can get away with. If an agency can squeeze a big volume discount out of a translator, it will. And if the translator can get away with not giving a volume discount, she won't. The need to hire and retain good translators, and the need to attract and keep clients, are what balance the equation.
In the end, I take a request for a volume discount as a bargaining position. I weigh that request against how attractive the client's work is, relative to other sources of work that I have. If the numbers don't match up, and the client won't accept my counter offer, then I won't take the work. If they do add up, then I will.
I agree that there is a ramp-up with most translation jobs, but you very quickly reach a point of diminishing returns. Conversely, longer jobs can create additional work in a way that a short job does not.
Long jobs typically have more 決まり文句 that you need to keep straight. More importantly, you may run into one such phrase early in the document without realizing it (or realizing it, but not quite knowing what it means), and only a week or two later, after slogging through 10-20,000 words, do you realize “hey, that phrase the author used somewhere in Chapter 2 really does have a very specific meaning and here’s what it is.” Maintaining consistency in style is another issue.
My own feeling is that long jobs, on their own merits, are quite possibly more work per word, so the logic of accepting a lower rate doesn’t so much have to do with effort as with the certainty that at least you’ve got a big chunk of work to keep you busy for a while.
@Adam
I definitely agree that there are diminishing returns. Pages 51 to 100 will tend to go a lot more quickly than pages 1 to 50, but not too much more slowly than pages 101 to 150.
As for the need to go back and make corrections, that’s the other side of the coin to improved quality. With the shorter job, you would have delivered a mistranslation; the longer job provides more opportunities to recognize and correct errors. And of course, CAT tools can help greatly with maintaining consistency over big jobs.
There is not doubt that productivity increases after you are more familiar with a job. But the longer a job, the more I tend to look at already translated segments with the eyes of an editor and I want to improve – which then again increases the time required. Another factor why I am not so keen on high-volume jobs is that, as a one-man show, it forces me to say no to too many of my other clients. So in a way I’m reluctant to work on jobs that would bring up the subject of volume discounts.
@Michael
I try to avoid the scheduling problem by negotiating a delivery date that allows me to take other work in between.
Lots of five-page, due “right away” jobs kill that strategy, but I try to avoid those types of jobs for other reasons.
Very interesting post, and it discusses an issue that is clearly important to many of us. In general, I am opposed to significant volume discounts, because as I am not producing widgets, there’s really no substantial economies of scale. Sure, I do get a bit faster when I am in the groove with the terminology, etc., but I am certainly not 25% faster, which is what I hear many agencies ask for. I agree with Michael that I (well, we, as my twin Dagy edits my work) also get pickier and more perfection-driven with longer jobs, which of course doesn’t help time-wise.
So far, we have said that we might consider volume discounts, but have not specified. One problem that Dagy has run into is that client promises “more work” if he/she only receives the special volume discount up front. Unfortunately, several of those clients were given a good-will (very marginal) volume discount and — you guessed it, were never heard from again. Now, if we offer any volume discount, it would have to be on a large project or, for repeat smaller ones, after a certain amount of words.
I do like your idea of a higher rate for smaller jobs; innovative!
Here’s another side to volume discounts: A few months ago, I quoted on a huge project for my favorite direct client, and I voluntarily included a substantial volume discount. It’s still pending, and from what I hear, they were totally not expecting the discount, and I might have shot myself in the foot if there’s no recurring terminology (honestly, it was 400 pages, so I didn’t take the time to read the whole thing). Might be another business lesson learned!
@Judy
Yeah, the “we can expect a lot more work in the future” line is a pretty old trick. I’ve learned the hard way not to put too much stock in that.
My standard policy is that I won’t set aside time in my schedule unless I have a solid offer of work, so these pie-in-the-sky promises are non-starters. If the client doesn’t have the work in hand, it’s not on the table for negotiations.
By the way, although they usually don’t work at the terminology level, you can use a CAT tool to pre-analyze a document and find out how much repetition there is. I have a free one called Analyze Assist if you’re on Windows.
It turns out that every time I have personally offered a volume discount, the advertised volume did not materialize. Every time. So, I don’t offer volume discounts at all any more, ever. I’m not saying it doesn’t make sense for some folks at some times, but I’ve simply come to the conclusion that it (literally) doesn’t pay.
Aside from the fact that PMs promising “more work” in exchange for a volume discount are blowing bubbles out their backsides, I have never understood the point of offering a lower rate for a big job when I already term down a significant multiple of what I am physically capable of handling.
I also do not believe that large jobs go faster in any way. QA is a lot more challenging, and in many ways I suspect that the effort invested is greater per word. Large jobs are also potential cash flow killers depending on the payment arrangements, and they make it more difficult to handle daily requests from a large clientele. I do in fact take on many large projects, but I schedule them to avoid taking up more than an average of 50% of my capacity for the period in which I work on them, and I never, never, never agree to any silly volume discounts.
Tend to agree with Michael’s comment that big jobs can make it more difficult to keep cache of regular clients happy. As a matter of fact I know translators (at least two) who sometimes turn down large jobs for that reason and would never think of giving volume discounts.
If you try to make unreasonable demands on your local car mechanic, he’ll laugh right in your face. How many translators have that much chutzpah? Of course bargaining power is contingent on having a solid client base to fall back on, and we are not all in that situation all of the time.
¿Are translation agencies willing to pay interests for late payments to the translators? Of course, no.
So, I am not willing to agree any to discounts to agencies or LSPs neither. A job has a price. That’s it. If they accept to pay it, ok. If not, I am not interested in bad payers and I loss no more time with them. There isn’t any logic in more work for less money.
It depends a lot on the nature of the job. If you’re translating something like a novel or a huge stack of newspaper articles, then it won’t get much faster as you translate.
But as another example, last year I translated a huge specification (several thousand pages). At the beginning of the project, I was translating 4,000 to 6,000 words a day. At the end of the project, I was translating 20,000 words a day. I provided a volume discount on that job, and still earned a lot more than I would have normally.