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Proofreading related work, should it be paid for?
Thread poster: Nehad Hussein
Łukasz Gos-Furmankiewicz
Łukasz Gos-Furmankiewicz  Identity Verified
Poland
Local time: 01:18
English to Polish
+ ...
... Jul 16, 2014

Nehad Hussein wrote:

Hello,

I need your advice on a money matter with a new client. An agency sent me around 700 words to proofread menus for big restaurant. They agreed to pay me by hour and asked me to send the actual number of hours that I did when the job is finished. We just agreed on the rate. They asked me to use their online CAT tool to finish the job which took me some good hours to read the manual and get used to their features. They have also provided a huge amount of references to check against.

So although the job is few hundred words that would usually take an hour, the work associated with it was huge. So am I fair to charge them the time I have consumed so far or they may argue that they just want to pay for the actual changes in the text (not for the extra time)/

Thank you for help.


Full hourly count. You won't need to bill them again for reading the instruction, but as long as you've ever first needed to read it prior to doing their work, the first time should be billed. Refreshers are up to you, but the first time is billable in my book. The first principle of hourly billing being no freebies.
 
Nehad Hussein
Nehad Hussein  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 00:18
English to Arabic
TOPIC STARTER
Thanks for your reply Jul 17, 2014

Your suggestion is great and has been welcomed by The client. for the first collaboration, he was convinced that the extra time for reading the instructions is necessary to finish the job.
 
George Hopkins
George Hopkins
Local time: 01:18
Swedish to English
Re jyua_us Jul 18, 2014

It would appear that not a lot of people know this:

International standard
Eg, yyyy-mm-dd (Quite often yy-mm-dd)

ISO 8601 can be used by anyone who wants to use a standardized way of presenting dates and times.
It helps cut out the uncertainty and confusion when communicating internationally.

The full standard covers ways to write:
•Date
•Time of day
•Coordinated universal time (UTC)
•Local time with offset to U... See more
It would appear that not a lot of people know this:

International standard
Eg, yyyy-mm-dd (Quite often yy-mm-dd)

ISO 8601 can be used by anyone who wants to use a standardized way of presenting dates and times.
It helps cut out the uncertainty and confusion when communicating internationally.

The full standard covers ways to write:
•Date
•Time of day
•Coordinated universal time (UTC)
•Local time with offset to UTC
•Date and time
•Time intervals
•Recurring time intervals ▲ Collapse
 
NUFCrichard (X)
NUFCrichard (X)
Germany
Local time: 01:18
German to English
false economy Jul 25, 2014

jyuan_us wrote:

Texte Style wrote:
If I have to pay the editor more to clean up the translator's mistakes, I don't see that the agency is winning out on this project, unless, of course the translator deducts that extra money from his own invoice. I don't remember seeing anything about that.


And the editor got $0.04 per word to edit the draft produced by this translator, and except for the change of the date format ( presumably 5 minutes are needed), probably he didn't need to make any other changes. And the editor can edit about 2000 words an hour on a file translated by this translator. And this editor's hourly rate is $30. When he edited this translator's files, he made $80 an hour.

And this translator refused to work with this company any more. They could find someone with similar quality, but it may take them years to find. Not that many equivalents in the translator pool in the market.

[Edited at 2014-07-16 13:58 GMT]

[Edited at 2014-07-16 16:48 GMT]

[Edited at 2014-07-16 16:48 GMT]


You saved time by not reading the instructions, it cost you time as you didn't put the date in the correct format. At the end of the day you come out about even!

You seem willing to edit your posts often enough, why not just change the date format and be done with it!
 
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Proofreading related work, should it be paid for?







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