How do you determine the right rate for your translation services?

As translators, possibly the worst aspect of both launching and running a freelance translation business is trying to work out how much to charge for your services. If you charge too little you’ll be working long, long hours just to pay your bills, but if you charge too much you run the risk of being priced out of the market. So how do you determine the right rate for your translation services? Possibly the easiest way to remove any doubt about your charge-out rate is to put together some objective data, like how much will it cost to run your translation business, and how much money (realistically) would you like to earn?

How Do Beginner Translators Set Their Word Rate?

Some of the confusion revolves around the fact that people have become accustomed to calculating their wages by the hour, and not by the word. So, of course, if you’re a translator just getting started you probably don’t know how to estimate just how long a translation will take, which means that you don’t know how to set your word rate in order to reach your target hourly rate. On the other hand, an experienced translator knows roughly how many words they can translate when working on different types of documents - whether they be technical or highly technical, HTML, general, hardcopy, handwritten, and so on. If you’re not an experienced translator there’s no way of knowing this, and the only way you can know is to time yourself while you’re translating to see how quickly you work.

Generally, a translator who uses good speech recognition software or who is a relatively fast typist is capable of translating between 400 and 600 words per hour, or roughly between 2000 and 3000 words per day, but obviously, this is only a rough figure. Highly technical documents are different, and even an experienced translator may only achieve 150 words per hour.

How to Calculate Your Billable Hours

Complete the following calculation using either your estimated or actual totals –

Work out how many hours per week you want to work;

Work out how many weeks per year you want to work, remembering to allow for vacations;

To get your total working hours per year multiply the above two items;

Subtract the number of hours you foresee for legal holidays off and sick time;

Next, subtract your non-billable time: this would usually be between 25 and 50% of your total working time, and will include accounting, marketing, slow work periods, meetings, and so on;

The result is your per year ‘Total Billable Hours’.