Proofreading/translation pricing negotiation for JPN-ENG documents?
December 10, 2018 5:35 AM Subscribe
I've been doing some technical translation work for an automotive company, and was asked last week if I'd like to proofread/edit the Japanese employees' English translations as well; this would involve going through the original Japanese and verifying that their corresponding English translations are accurate. I am not sure how to price this sort of work. Based on my current translation rates for said company (see inside), what do you think would be a fair price that neither party would be dissatisfied with?
Hi,
I’ve been doing some technical translation work for an automotive company for a bit now.
I was recently approached by said company asking if I’d also be interested in proofreading some of the Japanese employees’ English reports; in other words, I would be going through the original Japanese and ensuring that their corresponding English translations are correct. I’m assuming that I’d also be editing them in order to make sure they look professional.
I’ll be negotiating pricing later this week - which I hate by the way - and am trying to come up with a rate that is fair but puts bread on the table. The company is reputable and isn’t out to stiff me, but I also want to ensure that I’m doing right by them.
My current rates for said company range from $0.10 to $0.125 per source character (no spaces), depending on how the document is formatted and also on how much extra time I estimate it will take for preliminary research and editing.
Based on the aforementioned pricing, what do you think would be a reasonable price for this sort of proofreading work? I’m assuming it would be a bit lower than my translation rates - but I don’t want to price it so low that when I start my first document, I realize halfway through that I’m not making enough to justify my time expenditure (compared to my full-on translation work).
Thanks in advance.
Hi,
I’ve been doing some technical translation work for an automotive company for a bit now.
I was recently approached by said company asking if I’d also be interested in proofreading some of the Japanese employees’ English reports; in other words, I would be going through the original Japanese and ensuring that their corresponding English translations are correct. I’m assuming that I’d also be editing them in order to make sure they look professional.
I’ll be negotiating pricing later this week - which I hate by the way - and am trying to come up with a rate that is fair but puts bread on the table. The company is reputable and isn’t out to stiff me, but I also want to ensure that I’m doing right by them.
My current rates for said company range from $0.10 to $0.125 per source character (no spaces), depending on how the document is formatted and also on how much extra time I estimate it will take for preliminary research and editing.
Based on the aforementioned pricing, what do you think would be a reasonable price for this sort of proofreading work? I’m assuming it would be a bit lower than my translation rates - but I don’t want to price it so low that when I start my first document, I realize halfway through that I’m not making enough to justify my time expenditure (compared to my full-on translation work).
Thanks in advance.
My husband does localization editing for a major corporation with heavy presence in both Japan and America. He does only the final step you mention — the “editing to be sure it reads well” step. (He colloquially calls it “translating English into English.”) The first two steps, the translation and the proofing, are performed by two separate other teams, and they all get paid about the same. If they do want you to do both jobs, I’d be sure to charge for both of them.
How does your translation rate work out hourly?
posted by KathrynT at 6:14 AM on December 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
How does your translation rate work out hourly?
posted by KathrynT at 6:14 AM on December 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: Thank you for the replies so far!
nebulawindphone - Thanks for the reply and for your link - that EFA page is a wonderful resource!
KathrynT - I get paid by how quickly I translate, so I'd wager my current average to be $25-30 at the moment. I am relatively new to this so the start of the project is generally slow-going as I research and learn new terminology; by the end of the document I am probably making somewhere between $40-45 per hour. I hope to eventually be making somewhere in the vicinity of $50/hr.
These are guestimates though as I've never worked out exactly how much I'm making per hour. Is there a simple way to do so? Keeping track of my finances has never been my strong suit, I'm sorry to say... although I'm working on it :)
posted by CottonCandyCapers at 6:24 AM on December 10, 2018
nebulawindphone - Thanks for the reply and for your link - that EFA page is a wonderful resource!
KathrynT - I get paid by how quickly I translate, so I'd wager my current average to be $25-30 at the moment. I am relatively new to this so the start of the project is generally slow-going as I research and learn new terminology; by the end of the document I am probably making somewhere between $40-45 per hour. I hope to eventually be making somewhere in the vicinity of $50/hr.
These are guestimates though as I've never worked out exactly how much I'm making per hour. Is there a simple way to do so? Keeping track of my finances has never been my strong suit, I'm sorry to say... although I'm working on it :)
posted by CottonCandyCapers at 6:24 AM on December 10, 2018
You'll be using your full translation skillset
Not just that, but time proofreading is time not translating. Unless you do a lot of work at different complexities that it makes sense to have different price points on an ongoing basis, you generally don't do yourself a lot of favors working for less than your standard rate. On a freelance gig, I'll do janitorial work if they ask me to, but I'm still going to charge them my IT rate.
posted by Candleman at 6:33 AM on December 10, 2018 [3 favorites]
Not just that, but time proofreading is time not translating. Unless you do a lot of work at different complexities that it makes sense to have different price points on an ongoing basis, you generally don't do yourself a lot of favors working for less than your standard rate. On a freelance gig, I'll do janitorial work if they ask me to, but I'm still going to charge them my IT rate.
posted by Candleman at 6:33 AM on December 10, 2018 [3 favorites]
What you’re making now is roughly in line with what I’m familiar with for doing any one of the three jobs (translation, proofing, editing) that I expect to be part of this process. I would not charge less than that for doing two of them.
Before you take this gig, talk to the people signing the checks about what level of polish they expect out of the final document (as in final-when-you’re-done-with-it). It may be that they already have a loc edit team that will do the work to put it into standard business English; it may be that they just need it to be more or less comprehensible, not idiomatically fluent. But if they’re expecting you to get it from raw translation to idiomatically fluent, that is not a small part of the work, and if you try to just wrap it in as if it were free shipping, you’ll be sad.
(A humorous anecdote: I am a singer and I do a lot of contemporary Eastern European and Baltic choral music. These pieces frequently have the expressive directions — tempo, dynamics, etc — written in Estonian or Latvian or what have you instead of Italian and then machine-translated into English. I just did a piece where we had an aleatoric section, where each singer repeats a given phrase in her own tempo and time, and the translated instructions said “Entrances individual, as though each lady singer would had solo.” That’s a decent benchmark for “comprehensible but not idiomatic,” imo.)
posted by KathrynT at 7:22 AM on December 10, 2018
Before you take this gig, talk to the people signing the checks about what level of polish they expect out of the final document (as in final-when-you’re-done-with-it). It may be that they already have a loc edit team that will do the work to put it into standard business English; it may be that they just need it to be more or less comprehensible, not idiomatically fluent. But if they’re expecting you to get it from raw translation to idiomatically fluent, that is not a small part of the work, and if you try to just wrap it in as if it were free shipping, you’ll be sad.
(A humorous anecdote: I am a singer and I do a lot of contemporary Eastern European and Baltic choral music. These pieces frequently have the expressive directions — tempo, dynamics, etc — written in Estonian or Latvian or what have you instead of Italian and then machine-translated into English. I just did a piece where we had an aleatoric section, where each singer repeats a given phrase in her own tempo and time, and the translated instructions said “Entrances individual, as though each lady singer would had solo.” That’s a decent benchmark for “comprehensible but not idiomatic,” imo.)
posted by KathrynT at 7:22 AM on December 10, 2018
So you'll be checking and cleaning up the English writing of numerous people, none of them professional writers or translators? It will be really hard to estimate how much time this will take, and it can easily take five or ten times as long to understand and clean up the writing of Employee A compared to Employee B.
I'd recommend asking for an hourly rate for this particular task. As suggested above, you can do a few samples so that they have an idea of what to expect, but you don't want to get stuck with a per-character rate that might be based on a relatively easy initial sample. And somehow, sometimes rewriting someone else's English translation can end up taking even longer than simply translating it yourself.
(I've done various combinations of J-to-E translation, proofreading, editing, rewriting and copywriting, including automotive content, in the past, although never exactly what you're proposing.)
posted by Umami Dearest at 8:29 AM on December 10, 2018
I'd recommend asking for an hourly rate for this particular task. As suggested above, you can do a few samples so that they have an idea of what to expect, but you don't want to get stuck with a per-character rate that might be based on a relatively easy initial sample. And somehow, sometimes rewriting someone else's English translation can end up taking even longer than simply translating it yourself.
(I've done various combinations of J-to-E translation, proofreading, editing, rewriting and copywriting, including automotive content, in the past, although never exactly what you're proposing.)
posted by Umami Dearest at 8:29 AM on December 10, 2018
I translate and edit translations for a living (AMA!) My bilingual reviewing rate is approx. 1/3 of my translation rate. Some linguists prefer an hourly rate but I honestly would rather charge per word as I do with translation because I don't like keeping track of hours and I tend to bop around from project to project during the day. Yes, some edit jobs take longer per word than others, but the same is true with translation and within reason I don't adjust my translation per-word rate based on that either. It all evens out in the end.
posted by drlith at 8:47 AM on December 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by drlith at 8:47 AM on December 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
(I'd also point out that, if anything, translation review should pay better than translation [although this is rarely the case] because ideally the reviewer should be a more experienced/more skilled linguist in both the source and target languages than the first-line translator)
posted by drlith at 8:53 AM on December 10, 2018
posted by drlith at 8:53 AM on December 10, 2018
This thread is closed to new comments.
1) Honestly, unless it resulted in scandalously large numbers, my first move might be to quote the same amount as I charge for translation and see what they said. You'll be using your full translation skillset — if you weren't skilled in both languages and competent to translate between them, you couldn't evaluate whether a translation was good or not. So charge for the skillset you'll be using.
2) Do you know about the Editorial Freelance Association's list of rates? Another way to approach this would be to compare their rates for editing and for translation. Per-hour, they recommend about the same rates for both. But that ignores the question of whether one is faster than the other. If you know how quickly you do both, you can translate their per-hour rates into per-word rates. Using the EFA rates has the advantage that you can point to an outside source and tell your client "This rate is standard," which makes it harder for them to object. But if using their rates would mean taking a pay cut, then obviously don't do it.
3) If the issue is that you don't know how quickly you'll be able to do this kind of work, offer to do some sample pages. (The way I've handled this is "I edit the sample pages, I quote you a rate, if it's acceptable to you then you pay that rate retroactively for the sample and also for everything going forward.")
posted by nebulawindphone at 5:57 AM on December 10, 2018 [2 favorites]