Going on her figures and a character count for the book I just Googled up, her rate worked out at just under £80/kc. You don't want to be saying 500/kc and then finding you're getting scrappy little bits of work interrupting whatever you were doing for the sake of 40Y.Įdit edit: Was reminded of this interview with Cindy Carter, who translated Yan Lianke's Dream of Ding Village. So you can use that to help figure out what you should be making per hour.Įdit: If it's short items, I'd pick an hourly rate you're happy with and say you'll be charging that in half-hourly increments. 12 weeks holiday? That doesn't sound right. Imposed a 'making my life unnecessarily difficult' surcharge for that one.Ī rule of thumb I've been told for working out a day rate as a freelancer is to figure out what salary you think you're worth, then divide by 200 - ie, 365 days a year minus 104 weekend days and. I knew they had one though, so they gave me a bunch of photos of a printout of it sitting on a desk to work from. Had one job recently where they wouldn't / couldn't supply an electronic version. I'm maybe underselling myself, but if I get the job and an hourly rate I'm happy with. For new clients I'd probably assume £70-£80 and look for reasons to adjust from there. For regular clients who I know pay on time and send me work I can do at a decent pace I'll go down to £50. If you're a client paying that, I'll quite possibly happily undercut your current translator. I've been told (by a translator, not a client) that the 'standard' rate in the UK is £1 characters (the kilocharacter, or kc?). In any case, make sure your rates are high enough that you don't sit at your computer grumbling 'I don't get paid enough for this stuff' to yourself.) (The more businesslike answer would be: calculate how many hours it would take you, how many hours you can work in a day/month/year, how much money you need to make in a month to live nicely, add some percentage for the time you don't have work or take holidays and such, for retirement savings and insurance and such, etc etc, and divide and multiply all that until you get your rate per character. If she acts shocked you can always lower it a little (but not all the way to 300). If you're one of the few translators around, her venture is commercial and she has enough money to pay you (ie it's not a cash-strapped orphanage or something), perhaps ask for 600-700元/1000字 and see what she says. Here in Holland, for a commercial client, I would charge perhaps 15 eurocent per character if not more. I'm pretty confident that the client concerned had a good idea of what the going rate was, and I assume their rate was not out of the ordinary.Ħ00元/1000字 in Holland would be the low end of the scale, but I know translation doesn't pay as well in China (and the euro is cheap anyway, good time to work for Chinese clients). I was recently paid 600 yuan per thousand characters for a job, with the client noting that this was a bit higher than usual because Dutch is a 小语种.
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