| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | advice on discount given due to wrong word count Thread poster: Steve Booth
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Sheila Wilson 
Spain
Local time: 04:43
Member (2007)
English
+ ...
| You're not wrong! | Oct 8, 2010 |
Steve Booth wrote:
I had received a sample of the text that needed doing and was asked 'there are approximately 8000 words that need translating into English what is your rate per 1000 words'.
This tells me that the rate is per source word not target word.
Not much cause there for them to come back and say "we meant target words" - if the words are to be translated then it follows they are source words.
| | | | | An old trick, revisited | Oct 8, 2010 |
Some outsourcers offer you a first small to mid-size job at half your rate, saying that if their client likes your work, there will be enough of it to keep you busy all the time at full rate for a few years to come.
It won't make a difference whether you fall for it or not, but after this first job is finished and (hopefully!) paid for, you'll never hear from them again. They are only after such bargains, even if it's once in a lifeti... See more Some outsourcers offer you a first small to mid-size job at half your rate, saying that if their client likes your work, there will be enough of it to keep you busy all the time at full rate for a few years to come.
It won't make a difference whether you fall for it or not, but after this first job is finished and (hopefully!) paid for, you'll never hear from them again. They are only after such bargains, even if it's once in a lifetime from each translator.
These guys managed to take it one step further. They got the quantity discount they wanted from you... without the quantity!
On one side, I'll roughly wordcount any job offer I get, even if the OCR output (the text) is useless for a CAT tool. This will enable me to know if I'm actually dealing with a mountain or a molehill. If I have to do it by sampling, e.g. I won't scan a 400-page printed & bound book just to make an estimate, it's all right, I'll do it by sampling.
Next, I don't give any discounts for quantity. I'll be translating each and every word there. If I use CAT tools that I paid for, that's my problem. To confirm that, my rates in my domestic currency have remained unchanged since April 1994. This was only possible because advances in technology covered the unavoidable inflation ever since. So my clients get 1994 rates in BRL, but no fuzzy match discounts whatsoever.
On the other hand, on jobs over 5,000 words, I give repeated segments absolutely free of charge. If anyone thinks this is insane, let it get even crazier. Right now I'm working on a very large series of projects where 70% of the material is made up of repeated segments. Believe me, it is worthwhile. Yet the whole of it is so large that I wouldn't be able to handle such volume if the repeated segments were not so many.
So IMHO two things went wrong with your project...
First, you gave a discount based on their budget. I'd certainly do - and have done - it once in a while for a long-standing good client. I might do it once for a new client I consider having truly high potential.
In the latter case, I did it once for a few. Some became loyal clients at my standard rate thereon. Others persistently offer me jobs at those lower rates, and I persistently turn them down, unless I have absolutely nothing better to do with my time.
Second, you probaly alotted much more time to that project than you actually needed, so you might have refused a few gigs you could comfortably fit. That's why it's good to have a few 'fillers' all the time, though that's not easy to get. Quite often you run out of them. ▲ Collapse
| | | | | To be fair to you | Oct 8, 2010 |
Steve Booth wrote:
Perhaps I have got out of the habit of being ultra cautious over things because I have always been so lucky in the past and the agencies I have worked for have all been great.
It's easy to let your guard drop, as it were. And it's probably not just being "lucky", it's because you've been diligent. As is sometimes said in sports "the harder I practise, the luckier I get". Stories like this are lesson to us all to keep on our toes. I hope you can manage to wangle something out of it, but Lord knows where you'd start, apart from the implications in the original PO. Good luck.
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