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Rate per character
Thread poster: Inez Ulrich
Inez Ulrich
Inez Ulrich  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 09:04
Member (2016)
English to German
+ ...
Mar 26, 2019

Hi,

I have a client who wants to pay per character - has anybody experience with this? I have no clue if hos rate is acceptable or not: $5.38 per 1000 characters with spaces for proofreading/editing

Can anybody help?

Thanks a lot!
 
Christian Schaller
Christian Schaller  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 09:04
English to German
usually 55 characters per line, roughly 7.5 words per line Mar 26, 2019

That means your client would pay you a little less than 0.04 $ per word.

Best regards,

Christian
 
Inez Ulrich
Inez Ulrich  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 09:04
Member (2016)
English to German
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
spaces Mar 26, 2019

Thanks a lot, Christian - but what does characters with spaces mean for the calculation?

[Edited at 2019-03-26 08:09 GMT]
 
ibz
ibz  Identity Verified
Local time: 09:04
Member (2007)
English to German
+ ...
Characters with spaces Mar 26, 2019

Characters with spaces means just every character you type, i.e. words as well as spaces.
 
Inez Ulrich
Inez Ulrich  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 09:04
Member (2016)
English to German
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
... Mar 26, 2019

Thank you!
 
Sheila Wilson
Sheila Wilson  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 08:04
Member (2007)
English
+ ...
Use MS-Word's statistics Mar 26, 2019

The average number of characters per word will be different for each language. I'd advise you to take any text you've worked on - in the language of this file, and look at the statistics in the MS-Word review pane. That will enable you to see the correlation between the number of words and the number of characters with/without spaces, for that text. Once you get a feel for the average, you'll have a feel for what's an acceptable rate. TBH, the only thing that matters is earning a decent rate for... See more
The average number of characters per word will be different for each language. I'd advise you to take any text you've worked on - in the language of this file, and look at the statistics in the MS-Word review pane. That will enable you to see the correlation between the number of words and the number of characters with/without spaces, for that text. Once you get a feel for the average, you'll have a feel for what's an acceptable rate. TBH, the only thing that matters is earning a decent rate for your time. You could quote for every "E" if you could be bothered to calculate how much each one should cost the client. . ▲ Collapse


Nikki Scott-Despaigne
Thayenga
 
Vladimir Morozov
Vladimir Morozov
Russian Federation
Local time: 09:04
English to Russian
+ ...
That's not much! Mar 26, 2019

If you are accustomed to rates per line, let's do a bit of math: 1000 characters means about 18 lines of 55 characters each; so the rate per line will be less than $0.30 per line or less than $9.00 per page of 30 lines. That doesn't seem to be much for Germany.

Nikki Scott-Despaigne
Inez Ulrich
 
Inez Ulrich
Inez Ulrich  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 09:04
Member (2016)
English to German
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
thanks all! Mar 26, 2019

Thank you, both, for your input. I haven't worked for this client so far, but I also had the feeling it wouldn't be enough. I usually charge around € 0,04/word for proofreading, so this would be way below that rate.
 
Inez Ulrich
Inez Ulrich  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 09:04
Member (2016)
English to German
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
.. Mar 26, 2019

Vladimir Morozov wrote:

If you are accustomed to rates per line, let's do a bit of math: 1000 characters means about 18 lines of 55 characters each; so the rate per line will be less than $0.30 per line or less than $9.00 per page of 30 lines. That doesn't seem to be much for Germany.


that would be for proofreading, not translation, but it is still pretty little.
 


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