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| On call: doctors and translators. |
The
German-speaking blogosphere recently saw an interesting discussion about
pricing models for translations centered around whether should you should charge by the line/word or by the hour/project, which is an important topic, as is pricing in general. While the
jury is still out on this one (we personally like the hour-based approach for
certain projects and have written about this issue extensively), Dagy recently had a very unique request from an advertising
agency client that we'd never had before: they asked her to provide a quote for her availability for possible
translations, six days in a row, including the weekend.
After
consulting with her favorite business partner, Dagy decided to charge EUR 500
per business day and EUR 750 for every day of the weekend, plus a slightly
discounted rate per line for any translations. In exchange, she guaranteed
permanent availability and the fastest possible completion of all translations,
every day from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Even though we've worked hard on developing and insisting on professional rates for our services, Dagy did fall into the stereotypical self-exploiting freelancer trap with one thing: she didn’t even think about including
a lunch break in her quote. We've made many business mistakes, and we usually don't make the same one twice, so next time we will definitely contractually set a lunch break. Lesson learned!
The client
happily accepted after zero haggling. Dagy had to cancel quite a few
appointments she had scheduled during those days, but it certainly paid off.
Most days, she received no translations. On two days, she did a lot of
translations, which had a nice impact on the
final invoice. While Dagy did feel a little limited in her daily activities,
she was certainly happy with what ended up being a highly lucrative week. During her stand-by times, she
also proofed several hundred pages of a German-language annual report, which is
per se a major project, and also worked on a wide variety of other client projects.
We believe
this experience goes to show that even very unique pricing models are possible
in our industry and that clients are prepared to pay adequate prices for extraordinary
services. Why not keep that in mind next time you negotiate with a client?
By the way: what
Dagy ended up translating were documents regarding a highly confidential
company acquisition by a large European company. The estimated purchase price was
in the billions. It does feel nice to have been part of such a major deal, even to a
very small extent.
5 comments:
Lots of food for thought and entrepreneurial thinking in here! I'm going to share this with my translation students who are graduating this spring and have so many questions about the business end of translation. (And naturally they will be ORDERED to buy your book as well!) ;-)
Great Post!
I will surely buy your Book which related to translation and also recommends everyone to read your book especially translators.
Thanks for sharing!
@Michael: Thanks for your thoughtful comment and for ordering your poor, poor (haha) students to buy our book. We hope they find it helpful! This on-call translations model is certainlya new one for us, but it's always worth putting some thought into these pricing models before you are confronted with them so one is as prepared as possible. :)
@Max: Many thanks -- we appreciate your comment and thanks for reading. We hope you enjoy the book. It's a labor of love, and while it does need a second edition, we think it does contain a lot of good information indeed.
That is a good approach since many people use the words to charge and i bet having newer methods would help promote the Translation industry hopng you book is availlable in amazon
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