Rate mal! What’s in a rate? — Part 3

27/02/2025
BlogRate mal!

Intro

Establishing Ranges

Finger Painting Numbers

Clubbing Together Estimates

Conclusion

Valuing your rates

Before completing my post-graduate in Translation Studies, I had mostly worked minimum wage jobs. Jumping up to a relatively high hourly wage but with lower billable hours was quite a shift. No overtime for me!

With the lack of standards in the industry though, it got me thinking.

How well or poorly paid are translators really?
How do rates compare to a country’s minimum wage?
And how well do rates compare to the average post-graduate pay-check?

So let’s have a thunk.

Establishing Ranges

I work in the UK, my source language is German, and as English is my target language, I very often work with American employers. So we’ll use these three countries as example locations and we’ll be looking at standard human translation.

For the year’s salaries, we’ll make it a range, running from an estimated yearly minimum wage to a lower-end yearly salary for a Masters graduate.

(These were poorly cobbled together from my frustrating foray through labour, education and private company reports on the internet—if anyone has any more concrete figures, I would love for you to send them my way!)

It’s important to point out that this is a thought experiment and cannot really reflect what rates should be or what mine are.

Instead, this is meant to put translation rates into perspective against yearly and hourly pay in other sectors and to perhaps make some suggestions on what we should be striving for in terms of the most basic compensation, given that translation is a highly skilled task.

Finger Painting Numbers

For the billable hours, we’ll take some estimates of how many hours a person works in each of the three countries, then remove 37.5% (non-billable hours) to give us the amount of time in a year one has to make the minimum and post-graduate wages.

Similarly, we’ll use some estimates for yearly salaries. This can be hard, as minimum wage is typically worked out by the hour, not the year. Likewise, post-graduate wages depends heavily on the sector you’re working in, and so offers quite a large range to pull an average from.

Because we have to take billable and non-billable hours into account, we can’t just use an already established hourly wage; instead, we’ll create some target salaries and go from there…

(You can see why this is a thought experiment. Any real scientist or economist might be frothing at the mouth right about now, but I’ll just keep ploughing on).

Here are some of the base figures I could fenagle, looking at 2024 which was when I first had this terrible idea:

UK
- Average hours worked per year: 1866 (acc. Clockify)
- (Minimum hourly wage: £11.44)
- Minimum yearly salary: £21,347
- Post-graduate yearly salary: £47,500 (£35,000 entry-£65,000 experienced)
US
- Average hours worked per year: 1892 (acc. Clockify)
- (Minimum hourly wage: $11.13 ($7.25-$17))
- Minimum yearly salary: $20,256
- Post-graduate yearly salary: $75,000 (somewhere between $50,000-$100’000)
GER
- Average hours worked per year: 1783 (acc. Clockify)
- (Minimum hourly wage: €12.41)
- Minimum yearly salary: €22,127
- Post-graduate yearly salary: €70,000 (€40,000-€100,000)

To move this into the realm of translation, we’ll use the calculation I gave in Part 1: take your target salary and divide it by billable hours, which gives you an hourly rate; take that hourly rate, divide it by the number of words you can translate in an hour, which gives you a per-word rate.

For words per hour, we’ll use the higher average of 400 words.

It’s worth bearing in mind that this number tends to factor in the time used to research and review—it’s 400 words of deliverable translation.

Of course, I know some translators who can happily do double the average in an hour with no outside assistance. More power to ‘em, as most translators who make bank do so because they are not just accurate—as we all need to be—but fast, too.

Clubbing Together Estimates

Let’s put all these numbers together:

Country	Billable Hours	Minimum Wage Salary	Hourly Target	Minimum Wage pwr
UK	~1166	£21,347	£18.31	£0.046
USA	~1183	$20,256	$17.12	$0.043
Germany	~1114	€22,127	€19.86	€0.050

Country	Billable Hours	Postgraduate Salary	Hourly Target	Postgraduate pwr
UK	~1166	£35,000	£30.02	£0.075
USA	~1183	$50,000	$42.27	$0.106
Germany	~1114	€40,000	€35.91	€0.090

Those numbers are all well and good for their respective locations, but because they’re all done in different currencies—the ones you’d most likely be working in—it’s hard to compare them.

So let’s take a quick look at what happens when we shove them under the same hat (obviously, exchange rates shift over time, so take this with a grain of salt):

Country	Minimum pwr in USD	Postgraduate pwr in USD
UK	$0.058	$0.095
USA	$0.043	$0.106
Germany	$0.053	$0.095

This mostly reflects what I observed as I was researching all of this, in terms of the trends for each of the countries in question—that the US typically treats its minimum wage workers pretty terribly in comparison but more highly values post-graduate level skills than the UK and Europe.

If we take a look at averages listed on ProZ, we can see that what translators ask for can both be above and just below our post-graduate pwr, depending on currency.

This does not however reflect what translators actually get in terms of a pwr, mind.

On a positive note, some of these values have gone up in the year since I last checked, although I will note that ProZ’s sample sizes aren’t exactly massive, with 27 participants (GBP), 57 participants (USD) and 135 participants (EUR) respectively.

These results also differ quite substantially from Inbox Translation’s study from early 2023, which suggests translators charge 0.082 – 0.118 GBP per-word, although they look at how much translators charge agencies (creating the lower estimate), so perhaps direct-client only rates (0.108 – 0.118 GBP per-word) stacks up better against ProZ’s data.

Conclusion

For my fellow translators, I wonder how these numbers stack with your experiences, both in terms of what you offer and what clients ask of you?

Are you working nearer minimum wage or are you getting the wage of a highly skilled worker? Is this based on how fast you can work or what people are offering for your services?

And here’s the hardest question of all (which many in the industry, myself included, ask ourselves): is translation worth it for you?

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