I came across this job offer somewhere else.  I was wondering, if you charge, lets say, 0.05 cents a word, that is 50,000 dollars.  Are these jobs real?   How often do they come up?  Do you charge per word on these jobs?  I have never seen this kind of offer before, So I was curious.

Marjorie

 You just need to check authenticity of the client.  There are jobs of such nature but be careful while taking this up. You must ask for a valid PURCHASE ORDER. 

Yes, they are.

It depends on the industry. Some guys make real big bucks in this business. Check out this: 

or this:

If someone wants to hire a translator for a very high quantity of work that will span many months full time, then he should be paying more, not less.  He should be paying at least the same amount as your smaller-project end clients for work of commensurate difficulty and quality.  Reason: you stand to lose your end clients if you have to keep refusing their work, and they you become dependant on that agency.  You definitely don't want to get stuck in a rut of working yourself to death for low pay and unable to find other work because you've lost your client base / can't expand it.

Actually some agencies address the insecurity of not being in a stable employment situation and offer something similar: steady income.  They think it is actually supposed to be attractive to have endless work, even at low rates.  Inexperienced translators fall for it because they haven't done the math.  Discounts for high volume make sense if you are manufacturing bottles.  The work lies in the design and creation of the bottling plant.  After that you stamp out (churn out?) bottles which takes no time at all.  The more you can sell, the better.  Otherwise you have to design and set up for another bottle, which is time consuming again.  But translations are custom-made.  The last page must be as accurate as the first.

"1,000,000 words" might be bait.  See a long worm and ask yourself if you are a fish.

Maxi

Interesting response.  I would not get into a job like that, specially if it is from a website with a job search engine.  Sounds like a bait.

Thank you, Maxi

I think you should at least double your rates (for English to Spanish). Even in 1992 (18 years ago), translators were earning at least .08 a word!

Agencies (used to) bill clients around .20 - .25 per word, so you are very generously giving them a .15 profit on every word you translate.

At .10 a word, 1,000,000 words would really be $100,000 for the translator and another $100,000 or more for the agency. However, the largest project I ever did (by myself) was 85,000 words.