I had come to the conclusion that rates really have been falling for one, simple reason – one agency for whom I have done a lot of work over a number of years simply stopped contacting me. After around four months I wrote to them, asking if everything was ok. After all, bankruptcies happen, company principals die or get taken ill – there are all sorts of reasons why a source of work might suddenly dry up. Their answer was very simple and very clear: although (they were kind enough to say that) I am “certainly one of their best translators”, my rates were simply too high. When they ask their own customers for the same money that they use to charge, they simply no longer get orders. They would only be able to make use of me, they said, if I could restructure my charges in such a way that I would be getting only something like 75% of my former rate. My relationship with this trusted customer is a good one, and the circumstances make it quite clear that this was not a “try on”. I should point out that I had been charging this client the same as I charge everybody else. On the other hand, I don’t know what their own margin is, and I therefore don’t know how their charges to end-customers compare with those made by other agencies.

The implication was clear enough to prompt me to write to all the clients for whom I have done jobs in the last two years, bluntly asking them whether my current price is a problem. Every single one was kind enough to reply, and every single one said that no, my prices are perfectly normal and perfectly acceptable. All of them but one said that they were simply finding that there is, at present, much less work about, and that companies who need translations done are trying to reduce the amount, postpone the work, or in some other way put less translation out onto the market. The only one who claimed to be as busy as ever is quite a small concern, and focused primarily on French rather than German, so perhaps not typical of my other clients.

There does seem to be still plenty of support for the old wisdom that if people will not pay a decent price, they may indeed get translations, but that he quality will be very poor. If a bargain-basement approach were to become a trend that characterised the whole market, good translators would eventually become altogether hard to find.

Conclusion? I don’t know, but it’s food for thought.

Some of it is promising, there can be no doubt. But some of it is appalling. The translation business, like shopping for gifts, is largely unregulated. There is good quality material available, but it is up to the shopper to find it. As I looked at some of these sites I felt as if I had wandered off the street of high-quality department stores, where carefully selected perfumes, clothes and other desirables are displayed under favourable lighting behind polished glass prior to being sold, gift wrapped and paid for by credit card. Somehow I had found my way into back-alleys where the cheapest tat, knocked-off copies and toys made in the correctional institutions of China were being touted at the lowest possible prices – just don’t bother going back and trying to find the stall again when it turns out that your toy is covered in poisonous paint, is broken, and wouldn’t be likely to work even if it were in one piece. Two examples may illustrate what I mean.

Some time ago I joined twitter, but somehow never quite grasped what the point of it was. (I’m “wildingtranslat”, by the way.) So I recently invested an hour finding some people to “follow”. One of them, going under the name of LyricLabs, was generating a huge number of tweets about translation jobs involving every thinkable language combination. I clicked on one or two, to see what the deal was, but in every case I found no details about the job, but was just led instead to the company’s main website. I held out no hope, but for the sake of being annoying I mailed them to ask why this was. To my surprise I got no less than two answers:

Dear alex
Twitter is to get keyword listing in SE. Have told my office to be in touch with you
Rgds

and

Dear Mr. Alex
Thanks for contacting us. We have rooted our twitter links to our website only
Pl. send your updated CV
Thanks & Regards,

You will realize that I have cut-and-pasted these messages, so there is no need to put (sic) all over them to assure you that the mistakes are theirs. In other words

• although the site is run in English, they are not very good at the language
• they are too lazy to press all the necessary keys

and they are willing to admit that

• the job offers are all fakes, and they are simply pumping them out on to twitter in the hope that the links to their own website, included in each tweet, will improve their ranking on Google.

Needless to say, I am not following them on twitter any longer.

As a second illustration, I found what did seem to be an actual job offer on another site. The Word file was available, so I downloaded it and estimated that at my standard rate I would have wanted about EUR 190 for the job, say USD 250. Perhaps I would have been willing to negotiate down, let’s say $200. The potential client was offering between $10 (yes, ten) and $20 (yes, twenty). One respondent had offered to do it for $10, adding (again, I cut and paste – all errors of spelling and puctuation are the message author’s):
“Please allow us to do you a accurate and professional work.”
Someone else, offering to do it for $20, asserted:
“I completed my work. Your document is ready. i already completely translated your file. now tell me where to send you this file. thanks.”
A third respondent, perhaps feeling that $20 really was too little, and perhaps therefore capable of a higher quality, offered to do it for $60, supplementing the offer with the message:
“Hello, I hace checked your text completelly. At my price I can provide Native German Translation and Proofreading by Native English. My service is perfect,check my reviews. Best Regards.”

I now just need a little video of myself walking away, shaking my head in disbelief.

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.