Rates for translating written Chinese?

[vellocet]

Tonight I was asked by an acquaintance of mine to translate emails for her from Chinese to English.  She has already gotten me to do some stuff on Wechat for her for free, and it's all foreign trade stuff: please send price list, I like this kind of milk powder, send photos, etc.  She asked me to translate for her and said I could name my price.  I have no idea what to tell her.  She's pretty well off, enough to travel to America to have her baby.  She loves the job I've done so far, she checked it in reverse with Baidu or Yandex or something.

 

I did a search on this forum and found that ¥300/1000 characters is standard in Beijing, but that was from 2006.  All the other discussions were for full-time translating jobs.  In my town, bilingual native English speakers are pretty rare.  I'm definitely the only one she knows.  300 sounds pretty cheap to me.  If it were you, what would you charge her? 

[Lu]

I was recently paid 600 yuan per thousand characters for a job, with the client noting that this was a bit higher than usual because Dutch is a 小语种. I'm pretty confident that the client concerned had a good idea of what the going rate was, and I assume their rate was not out of the ordinary.

 

600元/1000字 in Holland would be the low end of the scale, but I know translation doesn't pay as well in China (and the euro is cheap anyway, good time to work for Chinese clients). Here in Holland, for a commercial client, I would charge perhaps 15 eurocent per character if not more.

 

If you're one of the few translators around, her venture is commercial and she has enough money to pay you (ie it's not a cash-strapped orphanage or something), perhaps ask for 600-700元/1000字 and see what she says. If she acts shocked you can always lower it a little (but not all the way to 300).

 

(The more businesslike answer would be: calculate how many hours it would take you, how many hours you can work in a day/month/year, how much money you need to make in a month to live nicely, add some percentage for the time you don't have work or take holidays and such, for retirement savings and insurance and such, etc etc, and divide and multiply all that until you get your rate per character. That is what you are supposed to do. I haven't done that. In any case, make sure your rates are high enough that you don't sit at your computer grumbling 'I don't get paid enough for this stuff' to yourself.)

 

Also, wait if anyone else has any input.

[vellocet]

Oh!  Well, I think it's going to be an email every day or two.  I don't think I'll ever be able to live on it.  Just a little paycheck once in a while. 

[roddy]

I've been told (by a translator, not a client) that the 'standard' rate in the UK is £120 per 1000 characters (the kilocharacter, or kc?). If you're a client paying that, I'll quite possibly happily undercut your current translator. For regular clients who I know pay on time and send me work I can do at a decent pace I'll go down to £50. For new clients I'd probably assume £70-£80 and look for reasons to adjust from there. I'm maybe underselling myself, but if I get the job and an hourly rate I'm happy with....

 

Had one job recently where they wouldn't / couldn't supply an electronic version. I knew they had one though, so they gave me a bunch of photos of a printout of it sitting on a desk to work from. Didn't even lay it out flat properly. Imposed a 'making my life unnecessarily difficult' surcharge for that one...

 

A rule of thumb I've been told for working out a day rate as a freelancer is to figure out what salary you think you're worth, then divide by 200 - ie, 365 days a year minus 104 weekend days and ...12 weeks holiday? That doesn't sound right. Anyway, that's what I've been told. So you can use that to help figure out what you should be making per hour. 

 

Edit: If it's short items, I'd pick an hourly rate you're happy with and say you'll be charging that in half-hourly increments. You don't want to be saying 500/kc and then finding you're getting scrappy little bits of work interrupting whatever you were doing for the sake of 40Y. 

 

Edit edit: Was reminded of this interview with Cindy Carter, who translated Yan Lianke's Dream of Ding Village. Going on her figures and a character count for the book I just Googled up, her rate worked out at just under £80/kc. But she put so much time into it that financially it's a pretty poor deal. That kind of stuff can be a labour of love. 

[Michael H]

How long does it take a skilled translator to translate 1000 characters? Just curious...

[Lu]

How long does it take a skilled translator to translate 1000 characters? Just curious...

That depends entirely on which characters.

 

Or, more seriously: depends on the subject (is it very specialised, is it something I already know a lot about), the style of the writer (Liu Xiaobo is a nightmare to translate because his sentences are endless), whether it's something complicated (article) or fairly simple (manual that keeps repeating almost the same instructions) and some other factors, including whether you get the text electronically or have to decipher it from a printout of a scan. Also on the quality a client wants/needs: do they just need to know what's in the text or does it have to look good or even be literary.

 

Another tip: tell her, preferably before you start on a translation, what the character count is and how much money that works out to. Different word processors can calculate the number of characters differently and it can be good to agree on a price before you have put time into something.

[yueni]

I charge US$150/1000 characters, more if it is highly technical and I know it will be time consuming. Depending on who I speak to, I'm either priced insanely high (they're expecting ~US$30/1000 characters), or insanely low (a professor of mine was like, what? Only that? Raise your rates!!!). I also have a flat fee/minimum I charge for quick work. Remember you're also charging for the time you take to invoice them too.

Subject matter absolutely affects how long it takes to translate a text. Is it something you already are familiar with? Or will you be doing a ton of research? Also what is the writing style and how much context do you have? Spreadsheets are the absolute worst for me because there's basically zero context. What does this random shortened term mean? I can't tell because it could be one of 3 things... In terms of writing style, is it straightforward or is there a specific style you are after? Patent translation is a crazy beast with a very specific meaning in the way words are used, for example. On a subject matter I am familiar with, in a writing style that is easy for me to write, I can do 2000+ characters in 8 hours. When I did patent translation, a silly 150 character abstract could take me all freaking day long.

[Lanchong]

If she responds that so-and-so agency charges 50元/1000字, point out translation at that price will be of a very poor quality. I lurk in a few QQ translation groups and, as nice as the members are, they are incapable of writing a grammatically correct sentence in English.

[Lu]

If it's short items, I'd pick an hourly rate you're happy with and say you'll be charging that in half-hourly increments. You don't want to be saying 500/kc and then finding you're getting scrappy little bits of work interrupting whatever you were doing for the sake of 40Y.

Or use a minimum amount per translation.

 

Was reminded of this interview with Cindy Carter, who translated Yan Lianke's Dream of Ding Village. Going on her figures and a character count for the book I just Googled up, her rate worked out at just under £80/kc. But she put so much time into it that financially it's a pretty poor deal. That kind of stuff can be a labour of love.

Literary translation is a whole different story. It usually pays badly, if there's a country/language where you can make a decent living of just literary translating I'd love to know. Thanks for linking that interview, it's an interesting read, and it's heartening to see that Carter also estimates her translation speed at about one page a day.

[889]

I suppose translating at an hourly rate is theoretically the right approach, but when the client is an acquaintance you'll want to avoid any surprises or misunderstandings, so go with the per-character rate.

You'll want to establish a base rate, then apply a surcharge for technical, legal or literary translations.

[陳德聰]

Another tip: tell her, preferably before you start on a translation, what the character count is and how much money that works out to. Different word processors can calculate the number of characters differently and it can be good to agree on a price before you have put time into something.

This is stellar advice that some may take for granted. Providing a quote is the best way to avoid any hassles when you're done, and you can also keep track of your quotes and what the actual price/character turns out to be so you can constantly adjust the accuracy of your quotes until your estimation becomes a preview of your invoice

 

For perspective, the Legal Services Society of BC where I live will pay uncertified translators $0.19CDN/word to translate documents from Chinese into English. They will pay $0.25CDN/word for certified translators. The documents don't even need to be legal documents, they may even just be personal letters in many cases. The xx/word thing is the bane of my existence though because how do you quote a price/word when your source is in characters... You can apply a ratio of anything between 1.2-1.8:1 characters to word, and I just did one at an arbitrary 1.65:1 which ended up being $115CDN/1000 characters at the "cheaper" rate for a friend's company. I would usually prefer to do 1.5:1 at $0.20 because I like round numbers (I know, it doesn't stay round after you convert it, but hey let me dream), but you can be flexible from client to client.

[Goshujinchama]

wow, I did it for a while at 200rmb/1000字 (CHN-ITA)

(no wonder I thought nobody could ever live off doing something like that... ).

[uni419]

Btw, does anyone have tips for good places on line to find freelance translation work for uncertified translators?

[Lu]

Providing a quote is the best way to avoid any hassles when you're done, and you can also keep track of your quotes and what the actual price/character turns out to be so you can constantly adjust the accuracy of your quotes until your estimation becomes a preview of your invoice (...)The xx/word thing is the bane of my existence though because how do you quote a price/word when your source is in characters...

I vastly prefer to be paid according to the number of words/characters in the original, that way everyone knows what the price will be from the outset. I think that should be easy to do for the OP though, since his client knows what a character is. If I get paid per word, the client won't know the final price until the thing is finished. Fortunately I haven't had that happen for short translations yet. If I translate a book I do a rough calculation when I'm about 1/3 to 1/2 in and let the publisher know the estimated end wordcount & price. The publishers likes to calculate the estimated end result from the English translation and the Dutch wordcount is always a lot higher, I'd like to think I've saved myself some headaches with that.

 

uni419: It's not that simple really (ask Kenny). What you can try is make your existence and expertise known to translation bureaus and ask them for work. Haven't tried this myself, but a 同行 of mine does this with some success. Apart from that, it's networking and more networking. Pretty much all of my work comes through guanxi.

[vellocet]

Thanks for everyone for the help!  I asked her for 1 yuan per character, and she bargained me down to ¥700/1000 characters.  I got a good deal, and so did she (I think I'm actually pretty good at translating into English).  Seeing as the messages she was having me translate for free earlier were to a Dutchman, clarity is even more important. 

 

Of course, I cheat my ass off.  I use Pleco Reader for unfamiliar characters and Baidu/Bing Translate for longer passages where there might be colloquial phrases I'm unfamiliar with.  Naturally I clean it up and make it all nice and tidy.  I try to keep the meaning more than translate the words, which is where I think a lot of C->E translators go wrong.

 

Anyway, thanks to chinese-forums.com!  I'm officially now a paid translator!  Woo!

[Lu]

Using dictionaries isn't cheating, that's part of your work! I have three online dictionaries plus Pleco open at any time when I'm translating, with some additional sites for additional help, and weekly meetings with my language partner for further unfamiliar stuff. Also don't be afraid to ask her to clarify things if something is unclear to you, that's a big advantage of direct contact with your client.

 

Glad you and your friend both got a good deal, good luck!

[Yorin]

 

I've been told (by a translator, not a client) that the 'standard' rate in the UK is £120 per 1000 characters (the kilocharacter, or kc?).

 

If the subject of the text is computer science, beware of charging your client per kilocharacter.

They'll pay you £120 per 1024 characters only.