Increase Your App’s ROI with Localization
3,165 freelance translators participated in a survey on current trends in translation pricing called ‘Voices from the Freelance Translator Community’, which was conducted by Common Sense Advisory in 2012. The authors of the report are Nataly Kelly, Donald A. DePalma, and Vijayalaxmi Hegde.
As reported from the respondents:
- Freelance translators receive 65.60% of their income from translation agencies, and 34.40% from direct clients. 47% of the 3,165 respondents received a very high percentage of their income – 90 to 100% – from agencies.
I’m one of the translators trying to raise their income from direct clients, but I know several colleagues who prefer working with agencies exclusively, mostly because they want to avoid the hassle of finding and working with direct clients. I think that trend is decreasing though, what do you think?
- 34.7% of the freelance translators had been victims of a translation agency failing to pay them.
That means that a staggering 65.3% had never dealt with a non-payer! That sounds incredible to me, having experienced 4 such cases during my 11-year career. I asked colleagues about this on Twitter a few months ago and most of the people who replied to me had at least 1 non-payer client. Lesson learned: I could have avoided a few of bad payers with more extensive research beforehand.
How do freelance translators react when agencies fail to pay them? Respondents could select multiple answers.
- 49.8% said they wouldn’t accept projects from the company in the future. 30.0% indicated that they would warn colleagues not to work for these agencies and 28.8% would post about them on translator forums.
I did all three, plus emailed and called my non-payers repeatedly, to no avail… After years of reading translation blogs and attending translation conferences, I now know many more ways to claim payments, I’ll write a post about it soon, stay tuned.
Do the three aforementioned reactions work? How are the agencies’ reputations affected?
- 40.3% of the respondents indicated that they had refused projects based on feedback from other translators
I always check the Blue Board at Proz.com and Payment Practices before working with a new agency. Several years back, I saw a low grade for an agency on BB, talked with the project manager about it, decided to trust them and ended up chasing my money for the following 2 years (at least they paid in full at the end).
What about CAT tools?
- 66.5%of freelance translators use CAT tools regularly. SDL Trados was on top of the list with 68.47%, followed by Wordfast (27.99%).
The most interesting part of this survey is that it offers far more than numbers and statistics based on answers. It’s full of tips and advice for translators on how to deal with pricing concerns, working with various client types, the differences on working with large MLVs as opposed to Small and Medium-Sized MLVs, how to approach language vendors and direct clients and so much more. The statistics are also accompanied by useful insights and quotes from the respondents.
Further reading
The myth of the non-paying client
About the author
Catherine Christaki has been a full-time English-Greek translator since 2001 and co-owner of Lingua Greca Translations since 2012. She specializes in Information Technology, Medical, and Technical texts and loves writing for the Adventures in Technical Translation blog. She regularly shares her experience and insight on social media and blogging for translators, giving interviews and presenting at conferences. Connect with her on Twitter @LinguaGreca.
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Astonishing!
Hi!
I would like to share my opinion with you about those non-payments. I have about 6 years of translation experience and I can state that I already had two cases in which an agency had failed to pay me. The first agency went into liquidation (I have been working with them for years) and I could not predict the situation so I lost nearly 900.00 GBP. It could also be a bad luck after so many years of accurate payment but I could do nothing and just put up with the whole thing.
Hi Nataliya, thanks for sharing your experience. I think a few bad/non payers are part of business. It’s hard but also part of business. If we do our research and spot the warning signs, we can minimize the chances of something bad happening, but I don’t think it’s possible to eliminate the hazard altogether.
Merry Christmas!
Hi Catherine,
Thank you for your reply! I strongly agree with you! We always face the risk in our business to meet non payers in spite of our checks and collected information from all possible resources via the Internet. In my opinion the crucial point is that two or three non payers or even more throughout the years of our translation career must not discourage us in any way from going ahead!
Merry Christmas! 🙂