How’s the Pay?

One of the questions I’m asked most often, both by email and in person, is how much translators get paid. “How much do you actually make?” folks ask. I sometimes wonder how polite of a question that is and whether they’d ask that of, say, a teacher or a doctor or a salesperson.

Well, anyway, the pay depends. How long have you been a translator? What type of work do you do? Where do you live?

The Translators’ Association here in the UK writes on their website: “The negotiation of fees is a matter for the individual translator and client to resolve. In the Society's experience of reviewing contracts, we have found that UK publishers are prepared to pay in the region of £88.50 per 1,000 words.” That’s a sensible starting place. Obviously, some really complicated jobs will require you to ask for a higher fee, while a simpler job that allows you to use translation tools and includes a lot of repetition of words will earn you less. Likewise, if live in a country with a really high cost of living, your prices should be higher. A small job may make you want to ask for a flat fee, rather than a per word rate. But start from the assumption that you want to earn around £0.08 per word.

“Can you actually make a living as a translator?” people also ask me.

The answer to that question is yes, and no.

It too depends. It depends on what type of translation work you do, how good you are at both translation and networking, how able you are to work alone for long hours and to chase down work, and how long you’ve been at it for. If you’re just starting out and you only translate poetry, you most likely won’t be able to work full-time as a translator. If you have a medical degree and you want to specialize in pharmaceutical texts, then you might have a better shot. If you’re an award-winning translator of thrillers, you’ll probably end up having to turn down work.

I recognize that this isn’t necessarily very helpful of a response. But it does reflect reality for translators. As you broaden your customer base and get more experience, you’ll get more work and be able to raise your rates. But it’s unrealistic to expect that as soon as you print business cards, you’ll suddenly be very busy with work.

That’s why many translators have “portfolio careers” or “parallel careers”, developing their freelance translation careers while also doing other work, such as working for a translation agency or publishing company, teaching, painting houses, practicing law, doing admin work, etc. It’s also quite stimulating to have different aspects to your career and to have the opportunity to move from one task to another. Personally, I feel it makes me a better translator.

A Round-Up of Articles

Here are a few articles on language, literature, and translation.

The first one is an article about inventing languages. More specifically, it’s on John Quijada and his Ithkuil language.

For those of us who work on the Nordic languages, this piece, which is on whether English is a Scandinavian language, is particularly interesting. It lists a number of English words that are Scandinavian in origin, such as: “anger, awe, bag, band, big, birth, both, bull, cake, call, cast, cosy, cross, die, dirt, dream, egg, fellow, flat, gain, get, gift, give, guess, guest, hug, husband, ill, kid, law, leg, lift, likely, link, loan, loose, low, mistake, odd, race, raise, root, rotten, same, seat, seem, sister, skill, skin, skirt, sky, steak, though, thrive, Thursday, tight, till, trust, ugly, want, weak, window, wing, wrong.”

Next is an article about the 800 languages in New York City.

Here is a piece on legal language and translation.

Finally, here is an intriguing article on a whistling language. As the article says, “This method of communication, in which the Spanish language is replaced by two whistled vowels and four consonants, has a peculiarity perfectly suited to this landscape of deep valleys and steep ravines. It has the ability to travel up to two miles (3.2km), much further and with less effort than shouting. By the 1970s and 80s, there were only a few whistlers remaining, but at the end of the 90s there was renewed interest in silbo, in part due to an initiative to make it a compulsory subject at primary school.”

Scientific and Technical Translation Explained

I met Jody Byrne at a translation conference in Shanghai in 2008 and he struck me as an intelligent, funny translator and academic. So I was thrilled to that his latest book, TEXT, has just been published. I look forward to reading it and I think many of you would find it useful too.

Not So Delicious

I love to read food magazines to get inspiration for my own cooking. One night a few months ago, I was having trouble sleeping, so I was reading an English food magazine called delicious.

I was quite shocked to suddenly see my own words on the page. delicious was doing a feature on a cookbook that I had translated, but there was no reference to the fact that this book had been translated, and there was certainly no mention of my name.

I often think that food is a way of bringing different cultures together; it’s a low-risk way of getting to know people. But we wouldn’t be able to do that without translators; translators are the ones who make recipes available to people outside a particular culture. My own translation practice has included many menus, recipes, and cookbooks over the years, and I’ve even written an article about the challenges involved in translating food.

After seeing that article in delicious, I wrote to the editor. I received a response that said that the publisher didn’t tell them it was a translation, so it wasn’t their fault. Personally, I wouldn’t accept an answer like that from my students (at the very minimum, you might look inside a cover and note who was involved in the production of a book), but I thought delicious could use the experience to learn something new, so I suggested they do an article about the translation of cookbooks. Many cookbooks in the UK are translations, but no one ever comments on that. delicious didn’t bother responding, but perhaps another food magazine will pick up the topic at some point soon.

So that was really disappointing – so disappointing, in fact, that I won’t be renewing my subscription to delicious – and it shows how much work we translators still have to do to promote our own visibility.

Italian Translation Award

I saw this announcement about an award for a translation from or to Italian on the MODLANGSRT list:

PATHS OF CULTURE 2008 TRANSLATION PRIZE

IPOC Press, the Milan, Italy-based publisher, invites translators to participate in the 2008 Paths of Culture Translation Prize by submitting translations in the following categories:
-- Translations into Italian from any language
and
-- Translations into English from Italian.
Competition entries may include translations in any of the following disciplines: cultural anthropology, autobiography/memoir, philosophy, management, pedagogy/educational sciences, psychology, sociology, history, and fiction/literature.

Highlights:
* Winning entries will be published by IPOC Press;
* The winning Translator will receive a prize of EUR150.00 as well as a contract that includes a royalty provision. (NB: In the event of works translated by multiple translators, the prize is intended as "per manuscript" and not per translator.)

Deadline:
Submissions must be postmarked (not received) by: 30 September 2008.
For full details and a manuscript submission form, please download the complete announcement from the IPOC Press site:http://www.ipocpress.it/eng/Concorso.pdf