Rates aren’t really falling, are they?

A few weeks ago I had an e-mail from a translation bureau based in the Netherlands. I had never worked for them, although, from the look of their website, they may well be a large and well-established bureau. The gist of the mail was that since “many of their freelancers had already offered to work for lower prices in the light of the global financial crisis”, or so they claimed, perhaps I would like to do the same.

I have now heard from a number of sources confirming the rather unsurprising suspicion that the GFC is having a significant, negative effect on the freelance translating trade. It could hardly be otherwise. And yet I see no reason to start doubting the accepted wisdom that translations are not primarily sold on price. Of course, anybody can price themselves out of the market, and I dare say that in a tighter financial climate this mistake is easier to make. Surely, however, the various aspects concerning quality, reliability, trustworthiness and so on are as important as they ever were.

My suspicion is that the agency concerned was simply trying to take advantage of the current situation to exert downward pressure on translators’ rates. They are, after all, in business, and there is nothing particularly wicked about that. I rather doubt, however, whether there would be many of us who would now say that they first noticed a drop in demand over the last six or twelve months, then compensated for that by dropping fees, and now find themselves as much in demand as they were, say, in the first half of 2008. This would, it seems to me, imply that the translation market is as responsive to price as the retail markets for petrol or sliced white bread. That seems unlikely, but I’d be interested to hear from anybody who wants to argue that I am wrong.