Hourly Rate

Multiple Services

Cats and Matches

Conclusion

Rate mal! What’s in a rate? — Part 1

27/02/2025
BlogRate mal!

A Four-Part Mini-Series

Ah, rates. The most annoying question for any freelancer, yet also one of the most important (to work, you have to eat, right?).

“How much should I charge for x?” has been asked a billion times on the Translation Studies Reddit, and to be fair to ‘em, it’s real hard to answer that question. Everyone has a different take, a different expectation, and no one is right…

So how might you work out your rates? Why are everyone’s answers different? Is the pay fair? What can I do to make it fairer? This four-part mini blog series — Rate mal! What’s in a rate? — will be looking at just that.

(“Rate mal!” means “Take a guess!” in German. It’s a terrible bilingual pun and I am absolutely not sorry).

Creating your rates

When calculating your rates, it’s important to give yourself some manoeuvrability and to design different rates for different tasks and to give yourself some boundaries to work within. Broadly speaking, these boundaries range between “how much do I need” and “how much do I want”.

To do this, we’re going to look at three things:

How much time do I have to make money?
How much money do I need/want to make in a year?
How much money do I want to be making per hour?

Time in a year

First, let’s work out how many hours you’re ideally going to be working in the year, how many of those hours you can bill for (which is time you’re directly producing your product or service) and how many of those hours are non-billable, such as time spent doing administrative tasks, finding new clients, self-marketing, networking, etc.

Here’s an example:

You want to work 40 hours per week
You’ve decided you’ll work 48 weeks out of the year
That gives you a pool of 1920 hours so far, but there’s more to consider
Average sick days (UK) mean you might lose another -96 hours
National holidays (in the UK) take off another -64 hours
Now your pool is about 1760 hours, but you’re not done yet
25-50% of your time as a freelancer will be spent doing administration and other tasks outside of the actual job you do, so taking an average of 37.5%, you might then lose another -660 hours of your hustle-time in a year
This brings you down to a grand total of 1100 hours that you can actually charge for.

Money in a year

Next, you need to look at your expenses: how much money do you need/want to make in a year?

What is your rent every month? What about your bills, your internet, groceries, petrol, memberships, loan repayments and any other regular expenses?

Do you have any production costs for the service you’re offering? Materials, tools, travel?

Take allllllll of those numbers, cram them together and then in a panic, remember that you’re doing your own taxes now, too!

In the UK, about 15-20% of your salary is going to go to tax, so you now have to bump up your estimate so that you’re not caught with your pants down.

For anyone who hated maths at school, you need to divide your estimate by 0.8 (or 1 – 0.[total percentage of income going to tax]). That way, when you remove x% tax from your gross income, you’re left with the money you worked out you needed.

Finally, you have to think about how much money you want to make on top. What goes into savings; what goes in the emergency fund if you suddenly need to fix a burst tire; what’s going into your pension so that when you’re too old to put your nose to the grindstone, you won’t be freezing all winter; how much money do you want for activities and luxuries?

In an ideal world, everyone would be able to make that extra mattress padding but it can be difficult, so that’s why I advise creating a rates’ scale running from a 0% profit “I need to eat, thank you” all the way to 100% “hey, maybe I will be able to pay off my student loan!”.

Knowing your boundaries in this way can really help you stay on top of the whole money thing and keep those sharks at bay.

Conversely, you might have a salary figure already in mind, in which case you can ignore all those pesky calculations and jump to the next step.

Hourly rate

Once you have your rough estimates, you can divide your desired salary by the number of hours you expect to work and BAM, you have your hourly rate.

That begs the question though: what does an hour mean for you?

For translators, we’re often paid per-word. For audiovisual translation such as subtitling, it will be per minute of video. There are of course pros and cons to being paid per unit rather than by the hour but you don’t buy shoes by how many hours it took them to craft, do you?

That being said, anyone trying to charge you “per document” or “per file” needs to be told to go chew on rocks, as it’s an easy way to scam you into doing more work for less pay. In all seriousness, tell those people where they can shove those documents!

The average translator will be able to translate 300-400 words per hour.

With machine translation in the mix, that number can be increased by 50-100% (depending on the tools and languages involved and whether the task lends itself to machine output).
Some tasks will require extra, specialised steps, such as heavy research or additional copywriting. This may require more time per word and at the very least, increases the value of the product, thus costing more.

Let’s say then you want to earn £35,000 in a year. You have 1100 hours you can bill for, so your hourly rate is £31.80, which we’ll make £32 for ease. In that hour, you can reliably translate 350 words, sometimes more and sometimes less depending on the content.

You per-word rate then is £32/350 = £0.09 or 9p per word.

So far in this blog, I’ve written about 1000 words, so for everything you’ve just scrolled through, it would hypothetically cost £90 to translate.

Multiple Services

How you then adjust your rate for different tasks can be tricky. Some translators separate their rates into 100%-75%-50%, some prefer 100%-60%-30% for translation, post-editing and quality control.

For specialised or creative translation however, the value goes up. If you want to make money in the industry, the advice you’re given again and again is always to specialise (or learn a very niche language).

Law, finance and medicine are the big three; academic and scientific translation are less profitable but no less demanding; and literary translation is a ball-game all its own.

Transcreation—”translation + copywriting”—which is often the realm of marketing and web translation, also tends to be treated differently and is typically paid by the hour.

If you’ve ever watched artist challenges on TikTok where someone has to draw a picture in an hour, then in ten minutes and then in one minute before comparing the results—aptly showing how much time is vital to the creative process—then perhaps you can see why.

Post-editing machine translation is especially poorly paid and is making up larger and larger portions of the translation work that is available.

This seems strange to me, since post-editing MT requires additional skills and training, so in a fair world, you would be making more than your standard rate per hour and not less…

Of course, such opportunities do exist and there are people out there who pay their translators—not just properly—but handsomely. That kind of work is hard to find though, despite the fact that the language industry is growing year on year.

Cats and Matches

There’s another wrench in the works when it comes to computers and translation and that is “percentage matches”.

When using a CAT tool, you have what are called Target Units, segments (typically sentences) of text which are saved in the Translation Memory. These saved segments are then compared against new, untranslated ones, and the percentage value of how similar they are is referred to as a match percentage, ranging from 0-100% where a 100% match means that they are identical.

You also have 101% matches (also known as “perfect matches” or “context matches”) where the surrounding segments are identical too.

Many agencies and translators offer discounts based on these match percentages, but this practice is somewhat controversial, as what constitutes a match can be self-defined using your chosen CAT tool, or inappropriate given the shifting context in a document (even with 101% matches).

Not only that, but many agencies decide what discounts they should get based on match percentage without prior agreement—I have signed up with a few vendors, only to then get access to this information and balk.

If you want to pay me nothing for a context match, then that segment won’t receive a millisecond of my time, and on your head be it if the context doesn’t actually, well, match…

Below are some examples of what you might find out there.

Unreasonable
Match %	Discount %
101%	100%
100%	100%
90%	75%
75%	75%
50%	50%
25%	25%

More Reasonable
Match %	Discount %
101%	50%
100%	40%
90%	30%
75%	20%
50%	10%
25%	0%

Under this model, how much one charges is based on how much the human is expected to intervene.

In some projects, such as when a document has been translated before but a newer version has some minor changes which need translating, it makes a lot of sense to only charge for translating that new content. If no further review is required, then not charging at all for 101% matches and quality-control rates for 100% matches is perfectly acceptable.

That being said, context matches should often be reviewed just in case (English, for instance, tends to abhor repetition, so unless it is expressly required, you may want to attack a context match with a thesaurus) and 100% matches often need editing exactly because of the surrounding context.

So really, it depends on the specific nature of the project you’re working on.

The issue is though, this particular way of doing things can be exploited and fenagled to scam translators into (once again) working more while getting paid less. Discounts for matches in a CAT tool should be discussed based on the project and not applied using an easily abused blanket approach.

Conclusion

For a freelancer, time really is money. I know plenty of translators who work with targets, some of them per hour, some daily, weekly, monthly, even per quarter so that they can make their living.

Decide what figures you want to work from and have clear targets. This will help you better steer the growth and direction of your business.

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