Thank you!
Can anyone tell me how much translators get per word here in Switzerland on average? A friend has been offered translation work from a medium-sized company and is not sure how much to charge.
What's your mother tung, from experience the translated to language should be mother tung.
I was in court & witnessed an appalling translation performed by an English women who lived in CH for 20 years . Awful at best , luckily the judge re translated the entire proceedings so the court records were accurate.
What is your skill level is required to the answer to your question, just fluent is the starting point.
The guy is asking on behalf of a friend.
The going rate is 10CHF per A4 page
Wallabies, translations are not charged per A4 page, they are charged per word or line.
Barna, what language pair does your friend work in? Perhaps you should check out this website: http://search.proz.com/employers/rates/
I know but noone was bothering to answer the question so thought it was worth putting in an answer that someone would at rubbish. By the way if some charged me per word I would refuse to hire them and require an hourly rate and an minimum rate of words per hour . google translate makes a decent substitute to anyone trying to overcharge anyway!
This subject has been covered so many times before that, like the OP, I've lost the will to search...
My friend would be translating machine manuals from German-Spanish, and German-English. She would be a lot faster in Spanish as that is her mother tongue. I have looked on this site for other discussions about this but most of them seem to be over five years old and figured the rates may have changed.
Thank you for any input!
I doubt rates have risen in 5 years, probably not in 15 years, prices & salaries pretty much stay the same
From freinds that work doing that, the going rate is around 3-3.50 Fr per line. That works out at quite a bit more than 10 Fr for an A4 page.
So about the rate I originally suggested
10 years ago, my company paid 950 CHF for 7 pages from German to English. They were charged per word.
In which case she shouldn't be doing the German-English, that should be done by a native English speaker. Especially if you're talking about manuals for machines with moving parts etc. A mistranslation could result in physical injury so the responsibility is not to be underestimated.
These are the rates recommended by the Swiss Translators' Association (ASTTI):
http://www.astti.ch/media/site/tarif/tarife_trad.pdf
As alluded to above, these have not changed in at least 10 years if not more
Judging by the quality of the language in many instruction booklets I've read, I thought they had simply run them through Google! I've had German ones where the only way to understand it was to look in a very large German > English dictionary and choose one of the 'other' translations for the same English word. Especially interesting are the Japanese > English > German ones.
German > English would be something along the lines of:
'The firemen ran up to the fire and unrolled their stockings'.
Translation is a recognised profession with its own standards. Trying to pay a professional translator less than his/her worth sounds rather exploitative to me.
Since it could be done anywhere in the world with an internet connection, I think you have an uphill struggle with that one.
Not at all. Plenty of translators are making a good living. Many people require a translator to be qualified to post-graduate level and/or a member of a professional body and pay accordingly.
As an indication, for academic papers I charge 20.-/2000 characters (space included)
The pool of translators with knowledge of Switzerland, Swiss systems and the Swiss flavour of German in particular is rather small. Bearing in mind that if you learn German anywhere except in Switzerland, all the text books focus on Germany.
German texts generated in CH are not something that can be translated by just anyone anywhere in the world with an Internet connection. Texts in other languages that need to be translated into German for Switzerland even less so. Hence the higher rates.
I'd say you're undercharging at that rate, if are fully qualified and experienced.
Of course, there are many more factors that affect pricing such as client's ability to pay, which is likely to come into play in academia - but there is a balance between the two. Undercharging in any field ultimately does nobody any good because it stops money moving around the economy.