Money

I've just recently signed up with another agency, which is the reason this post is late but more on that another time, and one of the things they wanted to know was how much I charge. As I was thinking about this I decided that, where feasible, I would be charging by source character rather than target word. There are a number of reasons for this, the primary one being that it is fairer.

I think it is fairer to charge according to source rather than target because it means that both myself and the client know what the costs will be in advance and also the client knows that I am not trying to rip them off. In a target word model, the client needs to hope that I am honest enough not to pad out the word count (which I am) but it also means that I lose out if the word count is less than I expect. As a translator I am always aiming to improve and produce more concise translations, should I be punished for trying to become better? This also makes it easier for both sides to plan because the client knows exactly what it will cost before hand, instead of a rough figure, and I know exactly what I will get for it (admittedly there may be arguments about the character count, but that's a different issue).

A third way of doing things is to charge by the hour, which many people do for proofreading and the like. This wouldn't work for me for two reasons. The first being Parkinson's Law, work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. I can drag out a driver's licence to take all day if I have nothing on. The second reason is that I have slightly erratic work habits and don't always work at a consistent pace. How can I charge by the hour in good conscience if I know I am likely to spend longer than is necessary?


To me, it makes more sense to charge by the source character. At least this way, the client gets a reliable figure and they know that I am not trying to rip them off. After all, if they don't trust me, they won't come back to me.

I'm not much of a socialist

I have a couple of pending invites on LinkedIn from people who would like to be my friends, or whatever term they use, and I'm not sure what to do about it. Generally, I only friend people I've already met or had some dealings with, in fact Twitter is the only exception to this, but I signed on with LinkedIn to form business connections, so I'm not really sure what I should do in this case. Although, I'd probably be more favourably inclined to them if they had actually written some kind of introduction, etc. rather than just using the standard formula that is provided.

I think this extends to other forms of social media as well, like Facebook and Twitter. I've signed up to them but I don't really know what to do with them. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say, I don't have the right mindset to use them effectively, the only friends I have on Facebook are people I've actually met and I probably average a combined total of one post a month on all the social media sites I'm a member of. I'm sure that some people can use these as tools to build up their business, although I haven't really seen much to convince me this is true for anyone outside of "social media gurus" who tend to espouse the benefits of social media because their business model depends on people believing this is so. But, I suspect that people who are able to use social media effectively are probably social people anyway and would use similar tactics even without the Internet. As is probably obvious, I'm not one of these people, hence the above conundrum.

So to summarise this slightly rambling and kind of, but not entirely, off-topic post. I've joined a couple of social media sites, which I make the occasional stab at updating, but I don't use them effectively to drum up interest in myself or my business and I doubt that will change any time soon.