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Off topic: Think your rates are bad?
Thread poster: DLyons

DLyons  Identity Verified
Ireland
Local time: 03:09
Spanish to English
+ ...
Oct 16, 2014

Then compare them to Adjunct Professors' ...

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/21/professors_on_food_stamps_the_shocking_true_story_of_academia_in_2014/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

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Thayenga  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 04:09
Member (2009)
English to German
+ ...
Reality Oct 16, 2014

Thank you, DLyons, for posting this link.

These are the cold hard facts of economic/professional reality. Not unlike our profession, considering all the time spent studying to achieve, to polish these skills to near perfection, all that knowledge gathered at ohe's own expenses, professors/tutors and translators seem to be near the bottom of the "wage chain".

Fortunately, there are exceptions in both professions.

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LEXpert  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 21:09
Member (2008)
Croatian to English
+ ...
Academia ultimately worse off than translation Oct 16, 2014

I've been following the tribulations of adjunct academics on slate dot com, another e-zine.
Certainly there are some similarities to our profession, in that extensive education and professional preparation can lead to wages that are basically below poverty level. Overall, however, translators have it much better. For the properly skilled and even modestly entrepreneurial among us, there is more than sufficient work to go around, even at average rates, and we have substantial flexibility concerning where to live and how to organize our lives. OTOH, graduate schools churn out far more PhDs than the academic job market (in the US, anyway) can possibly absorb. A new/better job almost always means uprooting your life and family to move halfway or all the way across the country, and if you're married/have a partner, a dual-career existence is very, very difficult (since that teaching job is very likely to be in some backwater college town in the middle of nowhere). A dual academic career is basically impossible unless you're both already established in the same location.

Sure, the translator's life has its share of frustrations, but viewed in perspective, it's not a bad gig at all.

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Frankie JB
France
English to French
+ ...
Meanwhile... Oct 22, 2014

...others make disproportionate amounts of money while adding no value whatsoever to Planet Earth.

http://www.fastcompany.com/3036880/how-to-make-500000-a-year-on-twitter

To sum up the long article, a (more or less) talentless lazy dropout is making 500K USD per year twitting daily some 60-70 worthless pieces of information to 7 million sheeple, making money through promotional tweets inserted here and there. The twitter account is https://twitter.com/UberFacts (worthless is not an overstatement as you can see).

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