Mirko Mainardi wrote:
Just today I received an offer from a US agency who found me on the directory and offered me $0.05 for a (big) confirmed project starting next week. The gist of what they said was: since the project is big we had to quote a low rate to get it. We know the rate we're offering you sucks, but you'll get 2.5k per day, every working day, for 4 months, and you'll also be able to work on weekends to compensate for said rate, if you so choose...
IMO that is an unacceptable proposition (and the mention of work during weekends makes it even more evident), but unfortunately, this seems to happen relatively often. Some agencies decide to compete on price (not just Eastern ones, but perhaps also because of them(?)), especially for bigger projects, and then offload the results of those rate wars on translators, by "proposing" them unsustainable rates. However, while agencies (or other middlemen) can accept a project of whatever size and then split it between X translators/editors and still make a profit out of it based on their markup (and proportional to the project size), individual translators can only do so many words per day, so the "big project" rhetoric is actually empty and meaningless to the average translator, save for the duration element, which however also has rather negative implications, such as unavailability for other projects/clients and obviously, working long hours just to scrape a living...
I am not so sure that agencies proposing unsustainable rates or however rates that could be equated with the wage of an unskilled worker (in the country(/ies) where the target language is spoken) really value and respect translation and translators...
Unfortunately, this seems to be the norm amongst agencies these days... it makes sense to them, because they are NOT doing the work... economies of scale don't apply to our work... but agencies sell translations as a commodity and we bear the brunt of it...
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