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.

1. Lack of knowledge about the market
2. Desire to get more work
3. Desire to avoid haggling
4. Lack of confidence

Lack of knowledge about the market

Information isn't evenly distributed in the translation market. This is one of the reasons why translation agencies thrive: they spend a lot of time figuring out how much clients are willing to pay for translation, and how much translators are willing to work for.

Finding out how much clients will pay is a lot of work, and as a freelancer I'm generally happy to leave this legwork to the agencies. But without a little knowledge of what translation buyers are paying, and what other translators are charging, it's easy to get short changed. That's why I recommend finding this out. Translation conferences like IJET are a great way to do this.

Desire to get more work

Especially when you're starting out, it's tempting to set your rates low in order to get more work. As Corinne says in the Thoughts on Translation blog , this is a typical beginner's mistake. While it's fine to set your rates a bit low until you get a decent amount of work, and gradually raise them after, setting your rates very low in an attempt to get work quickly usually backfires.

As the About Translation blog points out, low rates lead to quality problems, and worse yet, give you a reputation as a low-quality translator. We have a term for this in the industry — "bottom feeder" — and there's a reason why the term isn't flattering.

Desire to avoid haggling

Translators generally aren't the most assertive people on the planet. If our idea of a good time was pressing the flesh and making the big sale, we'd probably go nuts cooped up in an office with a compiler manual for company. A lot of translators thus want to avoid haggling over rates in order to avoid conflict, and so they set their rates a bit lower than where they perceive the "market" rate to be. Believe me, I get this.

The problem is, no matter how low you go, they'll always want you to go lower. Price in a large way sets expectations of quality. Studies have shown that when people are given blind taste tests of wine, they report enjoying the wine more when told that it costs more — and brain scans even show greater activation of their pleasure centers when drinking "more expensive" wine.

This means that when you set your rates low, you're creating an expectation of poor quality. The client then figures that since you're delivering lousy quality, they might as well get it cheaply.

Take for example this tale of woe on the translatorscafe.com forums. The original poster related that despite charging a depressingly low 1.5 euro-cents per word for book translation, her client was demanding still lower rates. When you make low rates your selling point, clients are going to pressure you to lower your rates no matter how low you go.

Lack of confidence

Translators also might set their rates lower because they're not confident of being good enough. Although you might think your translations aren't the best, when you set your rates low you're telling this to your clients. I say do your best, and let the clients decide whether the quality is good enough. And as About Translation mentions in the linked post, setting low rates will actually prevent you from getting better, since you'll be swamped with sweatshop work and won't have time to improve your skills.

Conclusion

Translators set low rates for many different reasons, most of them misguided. What a lot of them fail to realize is that under-selling themselves actually sends the message to clients that their quality is poor, and creates a vicious cycle that prevents them from getting out of the low-rate ghetto.

Finally, while the cost of living varies greatly depending on where and how you live, I strongly believe in earning a living wage. I sometimes get offers from India to subcontract my translation work for 1 cent per word. I always refuse for many reasons, but two of them are because I don't believe that would be a living wage even in India, and because I'm extremely suspicious of why a good translator would offer to work so cheaply, when they can earn much more working directly for agencies or end clients.

So far, I haven't felt any ill effects from the recession. I'm as busy as ever, and my schedule is booked fuller than usual; in fact, I was hoping to take the rest of December off, but it looks like I'll have to translate half days on December 28th and 29th in order to meet my January deadlines.

One thing I have noticed is several new companies approaching me, and asking me to work for what I'd consider very low rates (60% of my normal rates or lower). Since these are offers of work that I haven't solicited, I interpret them as companies smelling blood, and trying to take advantage of translator panic by securing low-cost providers. But it's frankly pretty hard to feel panicked when you've already got all the work you can handle.

I started translating well into Japan's "lost decade" — the massive recession starting in the early 90s precipitated by Japan's own real-estate bubble and subsequent meltdown. Despite getting my start during a huge recession, I had no trouble finding work. Old timers who were translating during and before the bubble tell me that after the recession hit, the same amount of work was available as before the bubble burst. That makes sense, because translation is generally a cost of doing business: if you want to sell your stuff outside Japan, you've got to localize your materials. If companies could get away with doing less translation, they would have already made the cuts. But the sky-high rates you used to hear about — like $100/page or more for routine translation — have been relegated to history, alas.

So I'm preparing for rough times despite seeing nothing but good times in my own business. I'll just keep tilling my little patch here in Okinawa, while keeping an eye out for a big tsunami rolling down from the mainland. If I do start getting less work, or find it impossible to command my current rates, then living in inexpensive Okinawa and having relatively modest spending habits ought to put my family in good stead.

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.