I had a look at this agency's requirements for application:

• Email lengthy resume, with lots of required information
• Email statement of motivation for applying
• Email several sample translations
• Send above documents via postal mail

Motivation for applying? Is this a freelancer application or an essay contest? And why require the same documents to be both emailed and posted?

I think the problem is clear: the agency's screening process is screening out the top applicants, not the bottom ones. I don't think many established translators would go through this kind of rigmarole just for the chance of getting work from this agency; established translators already have a good stream of work.

In other words, when you hire an established translator, you're competing with other translation buyers for this person's time. Why make it a hassle to switch?

It's pretty obvious to me that this agency thinks too highly of itself. You might even take the cynical view that the agency is screening for exactly what it wants: the timid and easily controlled. That's fine. But then don't come complaining to me that you can't get any decent talent.

How to get good translators

The big problem with this agency's approach is that it's passive. The agency puts up an "employment opportunities" page, and waits for the applications to roll in. This kind of approach is obviously going to be biased toward people who don't have enough work for whatever reason — in at least some cases because they're beginners or not good translators.

In my book, the best way to find good translators actually involves doing some work. Instead of passively waiting for applications, go to where translators hang out — mailing lists, forums, what have you. Find the ones who look competent, and contact them. Then if rates, specializations, and other factors match up, send them a small, paid job. If they do well, send increasingly large jobs. I've had several clients approach me this way, and these have turned into some of my best customers.

Sure, this is more work than casting your nets and seeing what turns up in them. But if you truly want good translators, and aren't just paying lip service to quality, can you afford not to?

Over on the Honyaku mailing list, however, "Captain Adam" doesn't think that translators should earn more than $75,000 per year:

In my opinion, a good translator is worth every penny. However, as a translation company owner and former freelance translator, I find it hard to justify that the occupation of "translator" is worth more than a $75,000/year salary.

Logically, clients should buy translation services based on what the service is worth, not by how much the translator is earning per year. Would you rather pay for lousy translation at a higher price, because the translator earns less money than a good translator?

But in my experience, this is a pretty common sentiment. I blogged before about how a translation agency lost a huge contract, and I lost a lucrative job, because the translation coordinator didn't think that a translator should earn as much in one month as I was billing.

I was going to write this as a comment to her post, but this got a little long so I moved it over here.

I started freelancing when I was in grad school. My wife had just gotten pregnant, we didn't have insurance in-state, and a back-of-the-envelope calculation showed that my stipend from the university of $1,000 a month wasn't going to cut it.

I started sending out resumes in November of 1997, and by January I had sent out around 200 resumes. I mainly found potential clients by searching for various combinations of "Japanese to English translator," "hiring," and "freelance" in Japanese (e.g. 和英翻訳者、日英翻訳者、募集、求人、在宅), using Altavista. I decided to work almost exclusively with Japanese clients, because I reasoned that writers would pay more for translation than readers.

A dribble of work started to come in immediately. I got my first job that paid more than $1,000 in January. The work gradually ramped up, and I earned $60,000 in 1998 (my first full year freelancing), while studying full time in grad school. I don't recommend this: I was so stressed during this time that I came down with shingles midway through my first year freelancing.

I quit grad school and started freelancing full time after the 1998-99 school year. After the first year, my income grew each year for a few years, and then leveled out; I've been earning roughly the same each year, within a band of about $10,000, for about seven years.

So in my case, it took me a year until I was ready to go full time as a translator. If I hadn't been studying in grad school at the time, I imagine I could have gone full time after about four months (that's when I started earning $5,000/month or more).

I actually didn't create a website when I started freelancing. I've never joined the ATA, and I didn't join JAT until I'd already been freelancing for a while. I created this website as a joke at first: the name "GITS" (from Ginstrom IT Solutions) has a less than positive meaning in Britain.

US $0.42/word certainly sounds a lot more enticing than the $0.10/word or so I see bandied about on sites like proz (and sometimes much less). Of course, this translation is going to require a very skilled translator, with a high level of knowledge of the field. From the offer:

The University of Tokyo has embarked on a project to make outstanding work by its faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences available in English translation. The titles selected will be published by leading academic publishers in the English-speaking world.

The translator is also going to have to work closely with the publisher, probably going through several revisions and proofing the camera-ready copy prior to printing. That's more work than the "fire and forget" mode of translation that's common when you go through agencies.

This rate isn't all that unusual. ¥38/word is about on a par with what the top translation agencies in Japan charge (about 50-75% of which makes it to the translator). It's middling for direct clients with highly demanding work. The University of Tokyo seems to be trying to cut out the middleman, thereby attracting a higher caliber of talent for the same money as going through an agency. An institution like UT has the administrative and publishing capabilities to handle such a task on its own.

I hope this can serve as another point on the graph to those wondering what freelance translators (especially Japanese-to-English) actually charge. Beginning translators especially tend to only see the bottom end of the rate scale, offered by the low-end agencies willing to hire inexperienced translators. But there's quite a large range available, depending on your talent, experience, knowledge, and marketing skills.

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.

Curious about this seeming consensus on average productivity, I calculated my average output per month for the past year. It turns out that I've averaged about 350 pages per month, which given 22 working days per month is about 16 pages per day, or 3,200 words.

I was actually a little surprised at that: it often feels like more. <G> But that's because I'll often have very high-volume jobs, punctuated by lulls of just a few pages per day. It's very rare for me to have no work at all in the queue.

As I see it, there are seven main areas where we can improve or expand as translators.

1. Target-language ability
2. Source-language ability
3. Subject expertise
4. Translation ability
5. New field
6. Soft (people) skills
7. Sales and marketing skills

I try to be improving in at least one of these areas at all times.

1. Target-language ability

I read extensively in my target language. I pay attention to good writing, and ask myself why it's good.

I also write outside of translation. This was the main reason why I started this blog — to force myself to write natural English without the tether of a Japanese source text.

2. Source-language ability

I've been studying Japanese for a while, and as these things go I think I've learned it fairly well. But compared to a native Japanese speaker, there are so many gaps in my knowledge that it's embarrassing.

I can't let myself get complacent about my Japanese abilities, because if I do then I'll stop progressing. There's actually a term for this in the second-language acquisition lingo: fossilization.

I try to push myself in Japanese, reading in new topics, writing in Japanese as much as possible, and speaking with new people. I'm always on the lookout for new turns of phrase or expressions. I've also got a touch of the "translator's curse": constantly asking myself how I would translate some particularly idiomatic bit of Japanese into English.

3. Subject expertise

I'm actually fortunate in that I work professionally in the field I translate. Even so, my knowledge is incomplete. I'm not working full time in my field, and there are so many sub-fields and specialties that there's no realistic way I can become an expert in all of them.

So while I need to continually study in my chosen field of specialization, I also need to maintain humility when dealing with the engineers who work in some niche field day in and day out. Even if their English ability is sub-par, I can learn from them on the technical side.

4. Translation ability

No matter how good your grasp of the source and target languages, if you can't accurately reproduce the effect of the original, then you're not a translator; you're just a bilingual.

I look for good translations, and study them. When I read English, I'm on alert for pithy turns of phrase that can work for tough-to-translate Japanese terms. As I mentioned above, I also have the translator's curse: always thinking about how I would translate a particular Japanese phrase, and critiquing translations I see. It makes it very hard to enjoy subtitled movies, but it does put me in the mindset of thinking about translation.

Degrees and other courses in translation are one way to improve in this area. I'm sure that they can be valuable, although I'm personally self taught (notwithstanding, I've actually taught a few seminars on translation myself). If I were to do some postgraduate study now, I'd much rather go for a degree in a technical field like intelligent systems than a degree in translation. But it's certainly a viable alternative.

5. New field

In addition to deepening your knowledge of fields where you already specialize, you could branch out to a new field. It could be a small step — for example, expanding from automobiles into construction machines — or it could be a big step, like moving from finance to biochemistry.

A medical translator once offered to show me the ropes of medical translation. She was earning roughly twice what I was, working less, and was booked out for 6 months or more at all times. So it looked like a pretty good gig. But after about my third rat study, sacrificing poor little furry animals and examining the tumors that had been induced in various organs, I figured I'd stick with software, where mice only get clicked, never sliced.

6. Soft (people) skills

This is an incredibly important, yet oft-overlooked skill. Being pleasant to work with; projecting yourself as an expert without seeming cocky; projecting yourself as a professional without seeming like a jerk. I know it sounds corny, but I found How to Win Friends and Influence People (Carnagie) to be a valuable book on improving people skills.

7. Sales and marketing skills

As they say, you can have the best "skillz" in the business, but if nobody knows about them you might as well not have bothered. Sales and marketing skills can help you get your name at the top of the list, and be waiting in the wings when that next big project comes in.

I think that being the quintessential technocrats, a lot of translators are adverse to marketing. I know I was/am. Whenever I think of salespeople or marketers, I can't help picturing something along the lines of Glengarry Glen Ross.

But one of the great advances of the Internet age is that it's now very easy to market yourself without resorting to scumbaggery. Instead of the Glengarry Glen Ross approach of tricking people into buying your services, you can market yourself simply by putting your CV online, blogging, handing out business cards.

Conclusion

My final word of advice would be to look at the list above, and choose the area you'd least like to work on as one of your targets for improvement. We tend to like to work on things we're already good at, and let others languish. So the area you're least interested in improving is probably the area where you need the most improvement. For me, it's a toss-up between people skills and marketing. How about you?

So it's pretty obvious that you don't want to set your rates too low at first. On the other hand, getting translation work generally means taking that work away from some other translator, and when you're inexperienced, price is one of the ways you can convince clients to give work to you instead of Tracy Translator.

One piece of advice I've heard is to charge 10-25% lower than the "going" rate until you've got as much work as you can handle, then progressively replace your cheapest clients with higher-paying ones. I'm not sure if I fully buy into this (what if you find a really great client at first; do you want to have to dump them in a year or two?), but it can serve as a rule of thumb.

How much other translators charge

The best way to figure out how much to charge is to find out how much other translators are charging. But such information can be hard to come by. Firstly, translators tend to be a bit coy about such matters, and avoid giving out rate information on the Internet. One reason is competitive advantage, but a big reason is probably that they charge different clients different rates, and they don't want that information made public.

Another reason why it's hard to find out what other translators charge is translation consumer interests. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the United States the American Translators Association has run afoul of the IRS on this matter for antitrust violation, and ATA members are therefore not allowed to discuss rates amongst themselves.

One way to get at such information is to go to translator conferences (like IJET), and ask people face to face — perhaps prefacing any questions with "Are you, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party ATA?" My first IJET was an invaluable source of information on how much to charge, and I've tried to share this information with new translators at subsequent IJETs.

Given the ATA's survey result that freelance translators make around $65,000/year on average, a back-of-the-envelope calculation says that freelance translators probably charge around US $0.11/word on average*.

* $65,000 / 12 months / 20 days per month / 6 hours per day = $45/hour; assuming 400 words/hour of output, that's $0.11/word

I'll go out on a limb here and say that for Japanese-to-English translation by native English speakers, rates are generally around US $0.10 to $0.30 per English word.

How much translation agencies charge

Another less direct way of finding out the going rates for translators is to find out what translation agencies charge. Many agencies don't list their rates, and you've got to keep in mind that even if rates are listed, the agencies will almost always negotiate specific rates for each job. But it's a good starting point.

This will give you an idea of what end-clients are paying for translation, as well as what agencies are paying. In my experience, about 50-75% of what agencies charge goes to the translator. So if the agency is charging $0.20/word, the translators are probably getting around $0.10-0.15/word.

Conclusion

Figuring out how much to charge is one of the toughest problems that new freelance translators face. Arming yourself with information on rates is a good way to figure out how much to charge so that you're a) busy enough and b) can feed yourself. Charging a rate that both you and your clients are satisfied with is essential for building a lasting business relationship.