| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | Poll: I have partially or completely raised my rates over the last 2 - 3 years. Thread poster: ProZ.com Staff
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Lieven Malaise wrote:
I have raised my rates several times in the past, but always in prosperous economic times. Given the succession of crises in the world, I have no plans in the short or even medium term to raise my rates, but neither do I have any plans to lower them (this also has some advantages: I do not have the slightest difficulty in defending my rates towards clients who would like a lower rate. No tiresome negotiations or discussions: take it or leave it). I have been lucky enough to have a constant workflow for years (I am essentially never without work) and that is worth much more to me than a higher rate but a lower workflow. It provides less uncertainty and more predictability.
[Edited at 2022-06-14 07:53 GMT]
Sound consideration. Plus I do not want to lose the stuff that I translate as it's not boring. I translate a lot of varied material, and if i were to raise my rates for certain agencies I translate for, if these agencies do not accept my rates, I would end up translating a lot of 'same stuff' and I'm likely to end up feeling very bored whereas these agencies send me different stuff to translate so I'm not bored and that is an important consideration for me too.
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 10:51
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Josephine Cassar wrote:
Sound consideration. Plus I do not want to lose the stuff that I translate as it's not boring. I translate a lot of varied material, and if i were to raise my rates for certain agencies I translate for, if these agencies do not accept my rates, I would end up translating a lot of 'same stuff' and I'm likely to end up feeling very bored whereas these agencies send me different stuff to translate so I'm not bored and that is an important consideration for me too.
Exactly. A high workflow means a lot of work and therefore a wide variety of assignments. That makes the work very pleasant, because we mustn't forget that translating is also just great fun.
Another advantage of a high workflow: you gain experience (and become more 'specialized') at a higher speed, because you translate an enormous amount of texts.
| | | | | Not necessarily | Jun 14, 2022 |
Lieven Malaise wrote:
Josephine Cassar wrote:
Sound consideration. Plus I do not want to lose the stuff that I translate as it's not boring. I translate a lot of varied material, and if i were to raise my rates for certain agencies I translate for, if these agencies do not accept my rates, I would end up translating a lot of 'same stuff' and I'm likely to end up feeling very bored whereas these agencies send me different stuff to translate so I'm not bored and that is an important consideration for me too.
Exactly. A high workflow means a lot of work and therefore a wide variety of assignments. That makes the work very pleasant, because we mustn't forget that translating is also just great fun.
Another advantage of a high workflow: you gain experience (and become more 'specialized') at a higher speed, because you translate an enormous amount of texts.
If I translate, say, legal texts, they're mostly the same stuff -quoting of Articles, chapters, directives, legislation etc. though the situations described might be different. The different texts I translate contain a chunk which is the 'same' too but then there are from videos which are to be released so they are quite new, statements, declarations, competitions, slogans. Varied and allow me to be creative too.
| | | | Dan Lucas 
United Kingdom
Local time: 09:51
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
| World is crazier and more of it than we think | Jun 14, 2022 |
Ice Scream wrote:
So in Japan nobody ever gets a pay rise, and they're happy for you to earn less and less in real terms every year as your skills grow? That seems bizarre. And unlikely.
Crazy, huh. That would imply that wages in Japan didn't rise for years on end and - oh.
Turns out that while a theoretical understanding of what is likely and unlikely is of course important, knowledge is, er, importanter. I took the data from the OECD stats database here. Average annual wages in Japan in 2000: 4,635,887 JPY. Equivalent figure for United Kingdom: 22,371 GBP. Figures for 2020 are 4,395,256 and 36,987 respectively. Indexed at the 2000 levels to enable proper comparison.
Why did this happen? You're, what, a year younger than me, so you must have been around for the whole "economic miracle Japan's going to take over the world" thing in the 1980s. Not clear to me that you noticed the whole "bursting of the bubble" in Japan from 1991 onward? There are more things in heaven and earth, Chris, than are dreamt of among the businessmen of our little corner of northern Europe. The UK has seen steady growth in wages over that time, Sweden I imagine has seen similar increases. Japan has mostly stagnated. Google "Japan's lost decades" for more.
Anyway. While those unfamiliar with the subject may find this approach to pricing unusual, there is plenty of quantitative (see above, and many other time series) and qualitative evidence (the experience of myself and thousands of other observers) for it, at least in manufacturing. I am less knowledgeable about service industries, so they may treat pricing differently. And of course, attitudes to prices/wages can't explain everything in an economy as large and diverse as that of Japan. Happy, as always, to hear differing ideas.
I am also willing to believe that the situation with regard to increasing prices/wages was different during Japan's high-speed growth era, but that was before my time and I haven't studied the research literature from that period. The work of contemporary academics like Ronald Dore would be a good place to start if you're interested. Having said that, I am confident that the core emphasis on prioritising the economic stability conferred by long-term relationships rather than seeking to maximise short-term financial gains will not have changed. Japan is a risk-averse culture, and that is what drives this behaviour.
To come back to translation in the here and now, the other issue that has not been I think touched upon is efficiency. I get a bit more skilled and a bit more efficient (largely due to tooling improvements) every year, so provided that I can maintain my prices, I gain a bit in terms of how much I can process for a given time. I can use that to increase my revenue and offset inflation so that my wages do not, in fact, decline in real terms. Alternatively I can use that efficiency to be more aggressive with my deadlines, or to enjoy a bit more free time.
All that aside, I must admit that the current level of inflation seems significant enough to make a valid case for raising prices.
Why I am being cautious? My view is that this level of inflation is a transitory phenomenon caused by temporary post-COVID problems with supply; that we're going to have a recession before long; that prices will come crashing down in some markets; that the amount of work available in my area of business will contract sharply for a while; and that when that time comes, my clients will remember who raised prices in 2022 and who didn't, and that this will influence how they allocate orders. Like my Japanese clients, I too am risk-averse.
As for other countries and language pairs, I don't know.
Dan
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| Hold the essay :-) | Jun 14, 2022 |
Dan Lucas wrote:
Turns out that while a theoretical understanding of what is likely and unlikely is of course important, knowledge is, er, importanter. I took the data from the OECD stats database
I'm not going to claim I know much about Japan, and certainly not as much as you, Dan, but I am vaguely aware of Japan's deflationary woes, and logic (again) suggests that the flat average wage must mask variations, and at least some workers will earn more year on year. It is not a communist state.
But anyway, you are not in Japan, and neither, I would assume, are most of your competitors, and I would expect your expertise and writing skills to enable you to command high, and rising, rates.
We are professionals, or verging on it anyway, not packers in a biscuit factory. Our incomes should not be flat, even in real terms.
As I say, we are all in different situations, but how many people saying "you can't do such-and-such" have actually properly given it a go?
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 09:51
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
Ice Scream wrote:
But anyway, you are not in Japan, and neither, I would assume, are most of your competitors, and I would expect your expertise and writing skills to enable you to command high, and rising, rates.
No, but in any given month 80-90% of my clients are in Japan, and in most things Japan is a slow, bureaucratic and rather fuddy-duddy country. It wasn't that many years ago that Japanese companies would expect freelancers located overseas to have a bank account in Japan because it was, well, normal in their world to have one, and potentially onerous for them to do otherwise.
As I say, we are all in different situations, but how many people saying "you can't do such-and-such" have actually properly given it a go?
Probably not that many, because it isn't a thought experiment. It has repercussions. I'll try not to write another essay, but in short, I have less than 10 regular clients. Some are larger than others. Let's assume I tell one of my larger clients that I am raising my rate. They respond as follows:
Scenario A: they will no longer deal with me
Scenario B: they continue to deal with me, but they seek to reduce business wherever feasible
Scenario C: they continue to deal with me, with no change in the relationship
I estimate that the probabilities of the above scenarios are something like 20%/60%/20%. Gut feel, not possible to quantify.
If my read of the situation is correct, then the likelihood of my coming out of such a proposal / declaration with an unalloyed win is about 20%. Conversely there is an 80% chance of damaging the relationship. That's not a risk-reward situation that I find attractive. If I had 50 clients, I would feel a lot happier about taking such a course of action, but then again if I had 50 clients, I would probably be a relatively unimportant supplier for most of them and they would be less inclined to accept an increase in rates.
No easy solutions, unless you work with organisations who aren't really subject to market forces and don't care about their bottom line. Mine are, and do.
Dan
| | | | Metin Demirel
Türkiye
Local time: 11:51
Member (2018)
Italian to Turkish
+ ...
| a unique case | Jun 14, 2022 |
Ice Scream wrote:
So in Japan nobody ever gets a pay rise, and they're happy for you to earn less and less in real terms every year as your skills grow? That seems bizarre. And unlikely.
There's always a risk of a customer finding someone else who is cheaper even if you don't raise your prices. But the way I look at it is they're only going to look for someone else if you disappoint them. And any translator who is as good as me, but doesn't charge as much as me, won't have any spare capacity anyway.
Does anybody really believe agencies don't raise their prices regularly?
Would you really rather do 10k words a week at 10 cents rather than 8k (or even 4k) at 20 cents and get to enjoy life more?
I know we all have different realities, but have you ever really tried standing up for yourselves? Am I really such an outlier?
While in general I agree with your approach (and I feel the same about "standing up"), Dan's is a unique case. That kind of opened my eyes because for the last couple of years I was of the opinion that it is the translators themselves who brought it upon themselves when they are challenged to accept lower rates or opt for less jobs. I've been fortunate to raise my rates over the years by ditching the lesser paying clients as I found new ones (actually they ditched me after I raised my rates). But I won't call it a success anymore because now I understand that there are elements larger than us that play a bigger role in the "strategy" department of our individual marketing activities. Once again, I come to realize that the picture is always bigger than I can see.
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Dan Lucas wrote:
I estimate that the probabilities of the above scenarios are something like 20%/60%/20%. Gut feel, not possible to quantify.
I suppose we all price on that rather random basis, but it's not very scientific.
If we never push for more, we can't be sure we're not underselling ourselves. We might actually be 20% cheaper than our competitors. We might not even have any real competitors.
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Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 09:51
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
| Pendulum of thought | Jun 15, 2022 |
Ice Scream wrote:
If we never push for more, we can't be sure we're not underselling ourselves. We might actually be 20% cheaper than our competitors. We might not even have any real competitors.
I ponder this often. I oscillate between thinking that the fact that I have decent flows of work means I'm pretty good in a field of many competitors, and thinking that the fact that I have decent flows of work means I'm not very good but that I have so few competitors that my clients have no option but to use me. Admittedly, in functional terms they have the same outcome.
I do actually know what one person who works for one of my clients charges, and it's the same as me, which is not encouraging. But maybe that person and I charge less than most?
Dan
| | | | Baran Keki
Türkiye
Local time: 11:51
Member
English to Turkish
Dan Lucas wrote:
I ponder this often. I oscillate between thinking that the fact that I have decent flows of work means I'm pretty good in a field of many competitors, and thinking that the fact that I have decent flows of work means I'm not very good but that I have so few competitors that my clients have no option but to use me. Admittedly, in functional terms they have the same outcome.
I do actually know what one person who works for one of my clients charges, and it's the same as me, which is not encouraging. But maybe that person and I charge less than most?
Dan
As you may remember you and I had a disagreement some time ago on the subject of luck.
Hear me out on this. About a month ago, I got a job from the Proz job board for the first time in 4 years. It was a large proofreading job, posted by an EU body (not a translation agency), and having nothing better to do at the time I applied for it with no thought of ever getting it. I asked for a very high per word rate (as high as most Turkish translators' going translation rate), didn't necessarily make a 'killer pitch', just writing a quick email in 5 minutes, saying I would respect their guidelines and I wasn't in the habit of undermining the translator's work by making unnecessary stylistic changes (which most Turkish translator-turned-proofreaders are wont to do).
To my surprise, I was chosen for the job. I didn't ask why they chose me among dozens of others, who must have waxed lyrical about their skills, experience, demonstrating their portfolio of translations/revisions on the subject matter, their 5-6 page long CVs or lying through their teeth... But I was really curious about it.
Today, talking with their translator (they made a point of putting us in touch for some reason), I realized why they chose me. It turns out that she'd been complaining about 'overzealous proofreaders' (such a wonderful term, coined by a colleague here to describe ****s) who kept making unnecessary changes (you know, the usual replacement of words with their synonyms to fill a Word document with a sea of red track changes) to the persons in charge of the translation department for quite some time, and that has been the decider in my case. Unaccountably, that one sentence of honesty (which, I must admit, also concealed a selfish motive in that, as a rule, I want to be done with proofreading jobs as quickly as possible. I'm all for letting the translator thrive if they've done a good enough job, rather than trying so hard to find/create faults) got me the job.
Now how can you explain this by anything other than luck? I'm sure you're a very good translator, and a competent subject matter expert, but don't you think we get lucky every now and then? I'm aware that you don't like the idea of attributing your success to luck, but doesn't it have any role at all to play in our line of work?
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 09:51
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
Baran Keki wrote:
Now how can you explain this by anything other than luck? ... don't you think we get lucky every now and then? I'm aware that you don't like the idea of attributing your success to luck, but doesn't it have any role at all to play in our line of work?
Baran, I do remember that discussion. I tend to think that over time the effects of "luck" average out, if that makes sense. To put it another way, I think that in life we are all faced with a steady stream of small and large opportunities generated by "luck". The competent and proactive can take advantage of these chances and add a little to their success, but less able or passive individuals can't or won't take advantage of them and end up not succeeding.
My view is that over time such minor issues don't make much difference to the outcomes, except in cases where the impact is truly huge: the unfortunate person walking down the street who is hit by a car driven by somebody who faints at the wheel, or conversely the winner of the Euromillions lottery. These are very low-probability events.
Were you lucky with that project? Possibly, but surely your cover letter helped enormously, because it reflected a sensible, balanced, and business-friendly attitude. But also consider all those times you suffered from "anti-luck" when answering postings, in which others benefited "unfairly" because they caught the eye of job poster for some random reason. Perhaps that other person happens to live in a city that the poster had visited the previous month, or maybe the email system had a problem delivering mail and all but two responses were delayed (including yours).
My guess is that it evens out, and that people mostly get the luck they deserve, but it would be impossible to prove either way.
Dan
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