Experience and Education

Staying Quiet

Money Talks

Marketing Machines

Conclusion

Rate mal! What’s in a rate? — Part 2

27/02/2025
BlogRate mal!

Intro

A Global Market

Language Pairings

Experience and Education

Comparing your rates

Like many of my peers, I’ve had to ask myself the questions “am I actually charging too little?” and “am I actually charging too much!?”

I’ve actually found myself being accused of both and although I’ve measured myself against some industry averages and taken my qualifications into account, it’s still hard to pin down whether I’m accurately assessing my worth.

This is because, in the translation industry, there are no clear standards regarding pay. So let’s take a look at some of the factors that influence this.

A Global Market

Translators are a multicultural bunch; both translators and LSPs can be located anywhere in the world and there’s no guarantee that they’ll live in the same countries that their language pair(s) focus on, especially because languages, despite the heavy amount of political emphasis we place on them, aren’t necessarily geographically locked.

Not only that, but being a heavily freelance profession, we tend to work remotely. In-house jobs—that don’t focus on project management—are pretty scarce, so if I were to move to Spain…who’s gonna know, let alone care?

Of course, some agencies “require” you to live in your target language country, but that’s less of an appreciable gain for your ability to produce that language than it is a marketing gimmick targeting clients that are ignorant about languages.

In the end though, how much a translation service might cost and how large a budget a client might have can depend heavily on where people are based in the world and their individual needs/resources.

Language Pairings

Similarly, rates can depend heavily on language pairings.

Some, such as French–>English and Spanish–>English, can be quite low. Others, such as German–>English can be quite high. This is more of a “market trend” thing but I would hazard a guess that the average locations of both translators and clients that work in those pairings also play a role in setting these values.

To illustrate the point, let’s look at some of the GBP averages from ProZ (2020-2025) and the mean/median averages from a study done by Inbox Translations (2023) that was shared by CIOL:

German–>English

ProZ

Inbox Translation

Spanish–>English

ProZ

Inbox Translation

To summarise: both of these show that Spanish averages around 0.07-0.10 GBP per word—I don’t know why I’ve decided to pick on Spain, but here we are—and German averages around 0.08-0.13 GBP per word, more or less ranging from generalised–>specialised translation (although these data sets are based on what translators ask for more than necessarily get).

If you would like to explore these resources some more you can do so here:

Inbox Translation’s report is certainly very thorough!

Experience and Education

Additionally, translation is not a unified profession in what counts as a “professional” translator, despite various bodies trying to lay down the law such as with the EMT competence framework and ISO:17100:2015 in Europe.

Thus different countries, companies and institutions demand different qualifications or experience-equivalents from their translators and many clients don’t know what counts as “professional” translation either—even if there are different yard sticks—especially in the English-speaking sphere which is so globally spread.

So someone who is highly qualified in one region may not then be seen as so qualified in another, thus making their rates seem too high or their services sub-standard, or vice-versa.

For example, in plenty of cases, being bi- or multilingual is deemed as qualification enough for translation in any direction. I might be quite a bit biased given my academic background, but translation as an art requires a little bit more than knowing multiple languages (hell, most people on the planet are multilingual).

Conversely, the UK requires translators to translate only into their “native” language, whatever the heck that means—normally something racist (I’ll write up that rant another day).

Staying Quiet

Another issue is that a lot of translators and freelancers don’t publicise their rates.

There are a lot of different for’s and against’s to this stance, and it makes any kind of standardisation difficult.

Personally, I’m actually one of the “don’t shares,” at least mostly: I’m happy to discuss my rates with other translators and vendor managers—and I of course offer quotes and estimates—but I don’t otherwise publicise my various rates and scales outright.

My logic here is fairly simple: I don’t like other people dictating how much I’ll charge.

It’s not as simple as per-word or per-minute. It’s the when’s, why’s and how’s of a task. I prefer to design a service package based on a task or a budget without setting up and being forced to break expectations by offering an oversimplified rates chart.

If you’ll allow me to be cynical, I don’t want a potential client to design their own package where they get everything and I get nothing because I “told them” my rates and then they (what we’ll generously call) “extrapolated”.

This is a little trickier with agencies who then publicise your services under them, including how much you cost. In that case, it’s easiest to bear it and just refuse jobs if they’re trying to take you for a ride, if you’re in a situation that allows for that.

The larger issue with this approach though is that it further intensifies the competition based on price alone. If you can one-stop-shop a translator, then why wouldn’t you take the best deal on the page?

Receiving quotes however is a little more personal, and you can get a better idea of who you might be working with, even if they are a bit more expensive than the other guy.

I for one prefer that kind of competition, although I know some agencies have small teams and tight budgets where they can’t be so free with their spending unless the results really do speak for themselves.

Money Talks

In the same vein, everyone is out to get the most benefit for as little cost to them.

Again, I’m being cynical, but there are plenty of horror stories out there of non-paying or deal-changing clients/agencies that cost a translator literal thousands that I think caution is justified.

In the end, everyone always wants your rate to go down while your living expenses are always going up.

Of course, many businesses use rising costs as an excuse to squeeze some extra out of their customers, too. (Such as supermarket chains, pubs and every subscription service ever…)

At the same time, some reports (if I can find them again, I’ll cite them) make the case that translation is:

One of the most underpaid professions against level of qualifications/experience, and;
One of the professions with the least pay growth per year, especially compared to inflation (being so geographically unbound as an industry makes that particularly difficult to deal with).

So which side is winning, do we think?

Marketing Machines

Finally, the biggest danger to the freelance translator is often seen as the rise of the Machine Translator. I don’t quite agree, given what machine translation—even in the age of AI—is actually capable of….

Instead, it’s the myth of machine translation. It’s not what AI/MT is actually capable of, it’s what people think it’s capable of—a carefully crafted mindset which serves to sell the software but not necessarily the promised results.

This misleading impression is another avenue of exploitation and pressure that some providers use to offer cheap, sub-standard services, which then further hampers pay-growth in the industry.

Conclusion

In the end, there are a mix of good and bad reasons as to why the translation industry lacks consistent pay standards, but if I were to offer a rule of thumb, it would be this:

Translation is expensive. Human translators are expensive, machine translation (both to operate and produce) is expensive, and all the surrounding management and review tasks are expensive.

At the very least, good translation, regardless of whether it involves machines, humans or aliens, feels expensive.

And if it doesn’t? It’s most likely sub-standard and we’re all being taken for a ride for someone else’s benefit.

Interested in hearing more about rates in the translation industry? Check out the rest of the Rate mal! What’s in a rate? mini-series:

Part 1 — Creating your rate

Part 2 — Comparing your rate

Part 3 — Valuing your rate

Part 4 — Marketing your rate

Image credit: me