The magic number is EUR 0.15: translator rate survey released in Germany
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Susan Welsh 
United States
Local time: 00:45
Russian to English
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for posting this. Hard to believe, but good to know.
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Didier Briel
France
Local time: 06:45
English to French
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Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 06:45
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
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| Skewed towards direct client translators | Feb 5, 2016 |
The results of this survey does not distinguish between agency translators and direct client translators, and a sizeable chunk of their respondents were direct client translators.
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| What is magic about €0.15? | Feb 5, 2016 |
@ Samuel: I assume that that the ommission of agencies is the blogger's error: Agencies were certainly included as one of the client categories in the survey published at the end of 2008. Agencies are also included as a client category in the SFT survey.
But my primary reaction is the same as Samuel's = What is this guy talking about? Yes, I agree with the fact that the German survey found €0.15 per word to be the average fee in many language pairs in the case of projects for privat... See more @ Samuel: I assume that that the ommission of agencies is the blogger's error: Agencies were certainly included as one of the client categories in the survey published at the end of 2008. Agencies are also included as a client category in the SFT survey.
But my primary reaction is the same as Samuel's = What is this guy talking about? Yes, I agree with the fact that the German survey found €0.15 per word to be the average fee in many language pairs in the case of projects for private-sector direct clients. But what conclusion does the blogger want to draw from this fact?
If we are talking about private-sector direct clients that are a reasonably good match for a given established translator, then €0.15 per word is low. If we are talking about generalists that happen to hook up with and then hang on to a given direct client, then €0.15 might be fairly high. I also can't imagine (as is suggested at the end of the blog post) that there are really major translation agencies out there offering prices that low and able to stay in business.
The SFT survey at least lists the highest and lowest fees given by their respondents (although without any kind of further information about the distribution of rates, this is of pretty limited use). Information about high rates seems much more relevant to me than average rates. ▲ Collapse
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| The omission of agency clients | Feb 5, 2016 |
is not the blogger's error. I bought the book and was very surprised to see that it doesn't contain agency rates. It only contains rates for direct clients, who are split up in various categories (government agencies and/or courts, commercial companies, private persons, colleagues)
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Bruno Depascale
Italy
Local time: 06:45
Member (2009)
English to Italian
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90% of the translation agencies I've contacted don't accept a translation rate higher than 0,07-0,08€ per source word in the medical field! 0,07-0,08€ per source word in the medical field, not 0,15€
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| Not agencies!!! | Feb 5, 2016 |
The EUR 0.15 refers to direct clients, not agencies, and is the median per word rate for the language pair DE>EN in the categories "government agencies/courts" and "commercial companies".
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neilmac
Spain
Local time: 06:45
Spanish to English
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As I've mentioned on other similar threads, the way I see it, if someone charging 15cents/wd subsequently allows discounts for repetitions or fuzzy matches or whatever, they may end up earning something like €0,10 in real terms. So, all in all it seems to be just another case of "lies, damn lies and statistics"...
[Edited at 2016-02-08 09:16 GMT]
PS: Anecdotally, a colleague who translates from German to English tells me that rates are being increasingly squeezed in his p... See more As I've mentioned on other similar threads, the way I see it, if someone charging 15cents/wd subsequently allows discounts for repetitions or fuzzy matches or whatever, they may end up earning something like €0,10 in real terms. So, all in all it seems to be just another case of "lies, damn lies and statistics"...
[Edited at 2016-02-08 09:16 GMT]
PS: Anecdotally, a colleague who translates from German to English tells me that rates are being increasingly squeezed in his pair. In fact, he's translating from Danish as well now to pick up the slack.
PPS: Don't they usually charge per line rather than per word in Germany anyway?
[Edited at 2016-02-08 09:20 GMT] ▲ Collapse
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| per line and per word | Feb 8, 2016 |
The book published by the German Translators' Association includes data on per line rates as well as on per word rates.
[Edited at 2016-02-08 15:20 GMT]
[Edited at 2016-02-08 15:55 GMT]
[Edited at 2016-02-08 15:56 GMT]
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Is this just for translators living in Germany?
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It's only for translators living in Germany.
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