Price Erosion!
Warren Smith
I just posted this to the FaceBook group, but am cross-posting it here...
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Friday, without looking too closely at it, I accepted a patent translation job from a global top-10 translation house for which I have done more than 6 million words of translation in the past (before work with this firm petered out a few years ago). The vast majority of this work was done at 16 or 15 cents per word, before dropping to 14 cents per word in 2019 (at which point I stopped working with this firm when they implemented an awkward automated project management system).
When I finished the job (a rather difficult biotech patent) and went to submit it, I was shocked to discover that the compensation for the job would be 8.4 cents per word.
What!!? Is this what "top 10" translation houses are currently paying? Are they actually able to find competent, experienced translators, with adequate understanding of the relevant technical fields, willing to work for this amount?
Because I am committed, of course, to never stiffing a client, I went ahead and submitted the project, but – in a rather weak protest, I am afraid – I left a note telling them that I would rather go unpaid than work for this disrespectful amount.
Is this the state of price erosion in the industry today? If so, what can we do as translators to fight it?
Carl Sullivan
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Joe Jones
Sent: Sunday, June 5, 2022 4:45 PM
To: hon...@googlegroups.com <hon...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Price Erosion!
Christiane Feldmann-Leben
Hi there,
same here in Germany.
The agencies get bigger and bigger and pay less and less. One
agency contacted me at the beginning of the year, they were so
happy to work with me, I were so good and reliable and blabla..
could I please adjust my rate to a lower one. This is indeed
appreciation of my good work to pay me less. :-(
I already lowered my rate insofar I am doing PE most of the time and this is paid less. So, yes I am doing more words than ever but earning less and less. Very unsatisfactory. A colleague of mine already gave up and looked for another job.
And yes, there seem to be translators in the market with a profound knowledge of Japanese, German and Chemistry living in Egypt, China or India, needing no money for living at all and delivering first rate quality. This is irony. At least I am obviously competing with such sort of "translators". The final clients probably think that most translators are a bunch of idiots and therefore do not deserve to paid decently. They have this opinion because they get poor quality for their money never dreaming what sort of translators have done the job. I have a new client who wrote me on first contact: "We are very unsatisfied with the quality we get from the agency. We want to try another way. Do you think you can help us." Of course I could and now have a new direct client. So, I would add a (d): we should somehow illuminate our potential clients how the translational industry works and that they could do better (and maybe even cheaper) not to go the big players but to us, the true professionals with sound knowledge.
Best wishes from Germany,
Christiane
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Dr. Christiane
Feldmann-Leben
Chemieübersetzerdienst
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Warren Smith
I love your logo, Christiane!
Brilliant.
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Lourdes Sonia Rivero Fernández
El 7 jun 2022, a las 0:09, Warren Smith <Warren...@comcast.net> escribió:
I love your logo, Christiane!
Brilliant.
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cpta...@ozemail.com.au
Dear Warren et all,
Please forgive any abruptness, I write with the genuine hope that my comments help people prosper and I offer them with all the loving care and affection for people’s feelings that are typical of an embittered 62 year old translator.
“If so, what can we do as translators to fight it?”
“As translators”, nothing. It is only you as an individual that can, needs to, should do anything about it. Other members of a putative “class” will let you down and hold you back and the hope that numbers will give you strength will just delay the day you find your own.
“fight it” Stop thinking of it as a fight. The only person you need to change is yourself. That might be a fight, if you tend to fight back.
Stop using rates per word or per hour as meaningful indicators of your prosperity. Just look at your overall income per annum (or at very least per quarter).
Don’t take on a job without confirming how much you are going to make out of it first. How can you know these things in advance?
Collect data meticulously. Record the hours spent: marketing, dealing with your IT equipment, your office, your neighbourhood (to the extent that those things contribute to your income) then per job: quoting, researching, drafting, checking, editing, formatting, proofreading, managing client expectations, invoicing and recovering debts, down to the minute. Define all these terms meticulously.
And of course all related costs. Make this data pretty and useable. Care about what it looks like. Imagine you had to present it to stupid and sceptical people.
Play with the data, analyse it, gaze in awe at the numbers and patterns it reveals about your life and work and the outside world.
Spend every moment you can every day thinking about ways to sell your product, ways in which a client would choose you over everyone else OTHER THAN PRICE. Collect and document and make presentable every anecdote that comes your way that illustrates why the cheapest translation solution is not necessarily the best. You need the raw material of a fear campaign that will make your clients very scared of going with the cheapest option.
With three months’ worth of data some things are likely to become apparent. Possible results include: you should give up translation; you should supplement translation income with something else (like interpreting or Uber driving); you should work less for agencies and find more direct clients; you should focus on one or more types of work etc. There are many possibilities certainly beyond my ability to predict, that’s the very wonder of individual experience as revealed by the data.
Employ other people.
Challenge whatever emotional reaction you experienced reading that last sentence. Interrogate it ruthlessly. Do not accept answers or explanations that make you feel big and clever and secure.
If you are so damned good at sitting there producing translated text, if you have been doing it for years and years accumulating tips and tricks and wisdom and building a network, then what is it holding you back from training and mentoring others in the skills that have got you this far? Is it your plan to take it all into the dirt with you at the end?
To whatever extent you have the expertise to comment critically on agency economics or demographic change or the difficulties of translation on Honyaku, you must also have the ability to extend a hand to aspirant translators and integrate them into a proven system for generating income as a translator. A system which would force YOU to externalise your expertise and test it in an organisation of more than one, validate it by submitting it to the critical scrutiny of people whose economic interests align with yours, and which would bring benefits to all parties involved. If you are in love with your current level of knowledge and expertise, you won’t believe how this will force you to grow into an even more legitimate object of self-esteem!
Why wouldn’t you build an army of apprentices and helpers and acolytes to help you exploit this amazing fund of knowledge that you alone were able to build up through hard work and frustration and persistence? Every bad experience you ever had is a lesson that a newbie would pay to hear. You alone were able to create it and it is your most valuable asset.
But something is preventing you from obtaining a return on that huge investment. You need to understand what is holding you back, where did it come from, who put it there?
An analysis of the data will make it blindingly obvious that everything you do could be arranged on a spectrum from “Things only I can do” to “Things a trained monkey could do” and all the time spent on the latter is dragging your income down. This has been common knowledge since Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations in 1776.
And where might such people be found? You answered that yourself. Millions of them all over the world, with a thirst to learn and a passion for self-development that only you can unlock and with costs of living and expectations completely unknown and irrelevant to you and the only thing stopping most people from harnessing this obviously useful knowledge/value gradient to their mutual advantage is that some closet Marxists in their past indoctrinated them to believe that buying the surplus labour of another human and reinvesting it is somehow evil or unethical.
This has left them with unchallenged and dogmatic assumptions that a vast economic “system” plans and determines a role for each person based on their native skill set and that the fortunes of each individual are a function of this system which condemns them to a life of unconscious victimhood, like fish in a bowl waiting for the food to drop, never believing it is possible for individuals to break free from this role and see themselves as masters of their future and creators of truth. And yet the world literally cries out for such heroes to step up and set these wheels in motion. It could be you.
Don’t expect results over night. The hardest part about being in business is realising that it is happening. Learning all this stuff and obtaining clear confirmation that it was worth it took me decades. I write in the hope that I can accelerate that process for others.
I am available to discuss these things further on Zoom. There will be happy yelling.
Chris
Chris Poole Translation
24 Greenwood St, Abbotsford VIC 3067
T 0412 287 487
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Michael
Dan Lucas
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Dan Lucas
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Benjamin Boas
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Perry E. Gary
Challenge whatever emotional reaction you experienced reading that last sentence. Interrogate it ruthlessly. Do not accept answers or explanations that make you feel big and clever and secure.
If you are so damned good at sitting there producing translated text, if you have been doing it for years and years accumulating tips and tricks and wisdom and building a network, then what is it holding you back from training and mentoring others in the skills that have got you this far? Is it your plan to take it all into the dirt with you at the end?
To whatever extent you have the expertise to comment critically on agency economics or demographic change or the difficulties of translation on Honyaku, you must also have the ability to extend a hand to aspirant translators and integrate them into a proven system for generating income as a translator. A system which would force YOU to externalise your expertise and test it in an organisation of more than one, validate it by submitting it to the critical scrutiny of people whose economic interests align with yours, and which would bring benefits to all parties involved. If you are in love with your current level of knowledge and expertise, you won’t believe how this will force you to grow into an even more legitimate object of self-esteem!
Why wouldn’t you build an army of apprentices and helpers and acolytes to help you exploit this amazing fund of knowledge that you alone were able to build up through hard work and frustration and persistence? Every bad experience you ever had is a lesson that a newbie would pay to hear. You alone were able to create it and it is your most valuable asset.
But something is preventing you from obtaining a return on that huge investment. You need to understand what is holding you back, where did it come from, who put it there?
An analysis of the data will make it blindingly obvious that everything you do could be arranged on a spectrum from “Things only I can do” to “Things a trained monkey could do” and all the time spent on the latter is dragging your income down. This has been common knowledge since Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations in 1776.
And where might such people be found? You answered that yourself. Millions of them all over the world, with a thirst to learn and a passion for self-development that only you can unlock and with costs of living and expectations completely unknown and irrelevant to you and the only thing stopping most people from harnessing this obviously useful knowledge/value gradient to their mutual advantage is that some closet Marxists in their past indoctrinated them to believe that buying the surplus labour of another human and reinvesting it is somehow evil or unethical.
This has left them with unchallenged and dogmatic assumptions that a vast economic “system” plans and determines a role for each person based on their native skill set and that the fortunes of each individual are a function of this system which condemns them to a life of unconscious victimhood, like fish in a bowl waiting for the food to drop, never believing it is possible for individuals to break free from this role and see themselves as masters of their future and creators of truth. And yet the world literally cries out for such heroes to step up and set these wheels in motion. It could be you.
{snip}
John Stroman
How do each of these contribute?
• Profitability enables you to pay your bills. It is a combination of high productivity (output/hour) and working with good customers who provide sufficient volume and pay acceptable rates. You must develop an appropriate business model that creates profitability regardless of market conditions.
• Sustainability enables you to keep working. It refers to controlling and balancing your workload so that you have enough work, but not so much work that you burn yourself out. You need to plan for personal down time as well. Sustainability also involves personally interesting material for translation to keep you going day after day.
• Quality enables you to keep customers and get repeat business. A part of providing quality is field specialization (which also boosts productivity by shortening research time). MT output can only serve as a rough draft, and using the right term in the right place shows that you understand the content of the job you are translating, and that makes a strong positive impression on customers writing in specialized fields. Even if you are getting work through an agency, ultimate customers sometimes request the same translator who translated a previous job.
What personal traits make a freelancer successful?
• Many older freelance translators did not consider translation as a career path from the beginning, but continued because of inertia.
• Many people remain freelancers because they are introverts, or for a variety of other reasons, are just not cut out for conventional jobs.
• Successful freelancers are able to convert their skills into a product that someone wants to buy. Freelancing is a business.
• Successful freelancers adapt quickly to stay in business.
• Successful freelancers use, either consciously or unconsciously, concepts such as relative advantage from Economics, appreciation investment from Finance, risk management and outsourcing from Business, and Sustenance theory from Robert Ringer's 1977 bestseller Looking Out for #1.
• The principle of relative advantage means that you utilize your skills and experience to generate an advantage over your competitors.
• The principle of appreciation investment means that you invest in items that will appreciate in value over time.
• The principle of risk management means you forecast and evaluate financial risks, and identify procedures to minimize their impact.
• The principle of outsourcing means that you stick to tasks you do well and hire others to perform tasks you do not do well.
• Robert Ringer's theory of Sustenance of a Positive Attitude Through Assumption of a Negative Result. (Despite the reality of Murphy's law, you can't lose all of the time, so don't give up when things get tough. Assess, re-evaluate, and adapt.)
John Stroman
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cpta...@ozemail.com.au
That’s pretty good John.
Chris
Oroszlany Balazs
To summarize a whole analysis into one number, the average rate was 11.3 yen per word (all fields together), which is roughly equal to 8.4 cent per word. (Agency rates a bit lower)
If you have Kindle Unlimited (at amazon.co.jp), you can read the magazine for free.
Best regards,
Balazs Oroszlany
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Dan Lucas
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Oroszlany Balazs
For JA-EN, the average was 8.3 yen per character. (Again, lower in the agency survey)
Balazs
Dan Lucas
cpta...@ozemail.com.au
Perry said
“Very fine sentiments indeed, inspiringly expressed.
Call me an un-Christian ogre, but I take issue with the excerpt quoted below. Speaking for myself and maybe others on Honyaku, the last thing I would want is to expend time and resources training up competitors.”
I realise Perry your reference to Christianity and being an ogre was rhetorical, but to briefly and deliberately misunderstand you, I claim moral fineness of these sentiments very tentatively.
I am the least spiritual person you’ll ever meet. I’m not even sure >I< exist. But from that starting point I feel I can find some things that are arguably “should”s in all possible cases.
If you see a group of people in anguish, frustrated and self-hating (basically any group of translators) and finding their personal progress impeded by things that you yourself have managed to overcome, I think that there are no counter arguments strong enough to prevent you from sharing what worked for you and so you should do it. Like a Galapagos turtle will turn their friend the right way up. It is instinctive rather than “fine”. After all Honyaku has always been just that. Helping each other from our own experience.
The idea that an employee is potential competition is perfectly legitimate. But in 25 years I have had only one person who I supported and paid for a long period of time, jump ship and take some big clients with her. But she did so by charging them way less than I would have been happy to receive, and it is not just about the money.
It did hurt at the time commercially but I am a free market zealot and I must be true to my principles and wish her all the best. (I mean she’s never setting foot in my office again! But also see the free market.)
The owner of All Graduates – one of Melbourne’s largest agencies – once told me he likes the constant threat of interpreters and translators stealing his clients, because it keeps him awake at night trying to work out exactly what he needs to do to make sure his clients will always call him instead of the people who might be competing with him. That is one of the things I recommend that you do, if to date all you have been able to use is “dollars per word” to get by. That fear is the engine of innovation and development. That is the road to all the things that might protect YOU from the threat of purely price-based competition.
At the risk of introducing the antique theme of Marxism again, fear of proximate people competing with you is predicated on economics being a zero sum game, where the pie is a fixed size, and if one person has a lot then others must necessarily have less.
Apart from that being almost always a mischaracterisation of an economy, of all the industries in the world this idea would apply the LEAST to translation.
You know this if you recall the countless paying clients who have NO IDEA how translation works, and the millions of others who have never even used translation services (but who would benefit from them), or rather who have bumbled along for years relying on bilingual people, until the day they meet a professional and suddenly understand the difference.
We are unbelievably fortunate to work in an industry where we can literally create market out of thin air. This is a fantasy to the producers of spectacles, auto tyres, beer and lipstick. There is no person on Earth who doesn’t already understand the utility and market price of these things. But we have an entire future to create.
The arguments FOR employing people have to do with placing greater importance on the past-present-future axis, than on the here-and-now cross section of available work and how others might steal it away and hoard it from you. That is not, I argue, where you should be looking.
When you go to the bank to get a house loan they don’t ask “How much do you get paid per word?” they ask “How much do you make per annum?” My little rant the other day was about casting your mind outwards, rather than dwelling inwardly on your micro-economic experience and the failure of the world to acknowledge your glorious pain and personal triumph, a topic which tends to dominate the lives of many people identifying as translators.
I find it is far more rewarding to think of these things longitudinally, part of a journey, yours and theirs, and to rejoice in all the learning and teaching and development that takes place for you and the people you employ. (Here is a photo album from my website featuring some of our adventures https://pooletranslation.com.au/file/3497/1243 ).
It also makes money, and Warren seemed to be expressing concern over income, and I was offering one of the best solutions I know.
Yes Perry it takes time and resources to train someone, that’s the investment, you get better and better at it the more you do, and then it pays you back because they start adding value. You don’t need any capital investment, you can build up slowly with little risk to yourself, it is brilliant and that’s why I recommend it. To teach is to learn.
If anyone wants to have a go, call me. I hope she doesn’t mind her mentioning this but I shared all my recruiting and employment tips with Naoko Selland and her husband and have done so with others. More than happy to do it for anyone here.
Best regards,
Chris
From: hon...@googlegroups.com <hon...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Perry E. Gary
Sent: Wednesday, 8 June 2022 7:30 PM
To: hon...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Price Erosion!
Hi, Chris:
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Dan Lucas
Yes Perry it takes time and resources to train someone, that’s the investment, you get better and better at it the more you do, and then it pays you back because they start adding value. You don’t need any capital investment, you can build up slowly with little risk to yourself, it is brilliant and that’s why I recommend it. To teach is to learn.
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Perry E. Gary
cpta...@ozemail.com.au
Hi Dan and Perry,
Employing people was just one of the things I recommended people do if they are concerned about “price erosion”. Of course I realise it is not for everyone. But of everyone who says “It’s not for me” some might have reasons that simply need rethinking to make it happen. I was exactly like you Perry in the early 90s. Then one day asked myself “Why on Earth would I knock back work because I’m ‘too busy’? Here’s someone who wants to stuff cash into my pocket, how can I make it happen?”
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