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.

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.

Over on the Honyaku mailing list, Matt Stanton has a rather unique take on this topic: he believes in providing the entire spectrum himself.

Then all you do is adjust the time you spend on a translation to reflect the rate you're getting. Suppose you think you're worth 5,500 yen per hour. At 7 yen a character, you need to get through 786 chars per hour; at 5 yen, 1,100 chars. (At 4 yen, you'd have to get through 1,375 chars, which you might decide is unfeasible, in which case you would set 5 yen as your absolute minimum rate.)

The 5 yen version is not going to be very well written, there might be a few chokuyakus ["literal" translations -- Ryan] in there, some of the terminology might be a bit off, etc. – but so what? As long is there are no serious mistranslations or omissions of key material, you've provided a reasonable product at the
price. If the client wants better quality, they can either pay you more or find someone who's prepared to work for 4,500 yen an hour.

I personally would never take this approach; I can't stand sending work out the door that I know is sub-par. Sometimes with extreme rush jobs, I might not have enough time to do the translation to my own satisfaction, but in that case my quality is deadline-constrained, not rate-constrained.

It seems to me that intentionally doing shoddy work could backfire, by giving you a reputation as a poor translator. This approach seems to be working for Matt, but I think I'll keep turning down the low-paying work, rather than accepting it and doing a lousy job on it.

Matt goes into quite a bit more detail about his unorthodox work style in this thread.

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.