The GITS Blog

Photo by Steve Wampler

A lot of translators charge lower rates than they could otherwise get, especially when they're starting out. There are a few possible reasons for this; here are a couple.

Lack of knowledge about the market
Desire to get more work
Desire to avoid haggling
Lack of confidence

Lack of knowledge about the market
Information isn't evenly distributed in [...]

Living in a sleepy Okinawan town, and dealing with clients 1,000 miles or more away, it's hard for me to get a gut-level sense of what this recession will mean for my Japanese-to-English translation business, and for the J2E translation industry as a whole.
So far, I haven't felt any ill effects from the recession. I'm [...]

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. [...]