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.

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.