There are many, many clients out there, and my approach has been to become less available to the least desirable of my clients as I find new ones.

Maybe clients that I’ve down-ranked in the past would have paid more if I’d asked, but in my experience it’s far easier to find a new client at a higher rate than to convince an existing client to raise their rates.

Note that rates aren’t the only way that I rank clients. More important than rates is how much I can earn per hour of work on average. It’s also very important how easy the client is to work with, how needy they are, etc. This is why I often find agencies more desirable than direct clients.

To bugbread, every single place where I’ve ever worked, if I wanted a raise I had to–guess what–ASK FOR IT.

I’ve worked in a free market economy before, and you know what? Every year or so, there would be an evaluation, and the employer would give people raises. They did this even if no-one asked for raises. This isn’t a 1950′s sitcom, where “asking the boss for a raise” is an opportunity for hilarity. In today’s free market, companies know that they need to pay competitive rates in order to avoid losing employees, so that’s what they do. The relationship between agency and translator doesn’t perfectly map to “employer – employee”, but in many many ways its very close.

Now, would I toss an agency aside because they didn’t volunteer me a raise? Of course not. But that’s not what Ryan’s saying. He’s just saying that, like any other company, an agency that gives performance based raises in order to avoid losing someone to better paying agencies is a company that “gets it”.

Nevertheless, translation agencies have offered to raise my rates without my asking.

Let’s think about this another way. There are many levels of translation ability. The difference between a good translation and a mediocre one often is the difference between winning a new contract or losing one, or keeping a client or losing it.

With the knowledge that your best translators are getting work from other clients, it seems obvious that you’ll try to make your work more attractive than the work from other clients.

I’m in the rather happy position that I’m offered more work than I can do. I therefore need to refuse some of that work. Assuming that one of the agencies I work for wants me to keep accepting their work, offering to raise my rates is one way to get my attention.

Not to say that I’m the world’s best translator — I’m not. But I do have clients who appreciate my work, and are willing to show that with the rates they offer.

Yes, I understand that much more goes into a strong, healthy LSP-freelancer relationship then sheer buying and selling. But an LSP randomly volunteering to pay you more is a completely unrealistic expectation. If you want a higher rate, have the stones to ask for it. That’s the way a free-market economy works. The lawyer sets his prices. The grocery sets its prices. YOU set your prices. We either pay them or we don’t. But please don’t toss a potentially wonderful work relationship aside because the LSP doesn’t volunteer to pay you more.

Feel free to use the content however you like, and good luck on your talk.

A lot of the agencies I work for have their own in-house DTP people.

That said, I do handle PowerPoint at no extra charge, as long as the format isn’t too funky. I have ways of dealing with PPT files that makes them suck a little less. What really gets me with PowerPoint is when the clients paste in figures from other programs, and you go to edit them in PowerPoint, and every sentence is split into multiple text boxes.

Worse than PowerPoint are the people who use Excel as a word processor.