Some translation managers don’t have a clue

Lately an agency asked me to check translations, and they wanted to pay me per “hits”.

A “hit” is a text segment that contains a number of words.

However, they can’t tell me how many words there will be per hit, nor can they tell me how many words there will be in total and how much the payment in total would be.

Not only is the rate per hit what you normally get per word, but you don’t know whether it’s for 1 word, 2, or maybe even 7 or 10.

The translator will have to judge the accuracy of some translated sentences and grade them based on how much the meaning of the source is transferred to the translation. It was for around 5000 hits, which could be anything from 5.000 to 50.000 words.

The contact person wrote me a hit “usually consist of short sentences”. So, the final result will be closer to 50.000 words than 5.000 words.

I have, of course, declined the offer, on the grounds that a) the price was too low, and b) it’s impossible to know the workload.

a) Too low, because this kind of work is usually underestimated by the managers. It takes much more time than expected once mistakes and changes crop up.

b) It’s impossible to know how much hours I would spend on it. The minimum of 5.000 words means at least 10.000 words have to be read, which is approximately 40 fully printed pages. If there is nothing to be changed, even checking whether it’s correct is going to take at least two hours. But if it turns out to be 50.000 words, and things have to be changed, it could mean at least 2 days of work. That means it’s impossible to plan such work.

If they don’t come up with a serious price per word instead of per hit, and if they don’t tell me the amount of words, this is impossible to plan. Whether you are allowed to work at your own pace or not, doesn’t matter. The pay is far too low anyway. Moreover, accepting such offers leads to unfair competition with better paying clients.