You know how they say - once a cop, always a cop. Well, something very similar can be said for those that choose translating business as their way of earning for a living. Furthermore, everybody who ever worked as a translator knows that it’s never just a way to earn your daily bread. Those languages have a way of crawling deeply into your way of thinking. They change the way you read, the way you perceive literature or ways people express themselves. You catch yourself a million times a day translating in your head what your friends are saying. You watch movies and translate them simultaneously in your head. And let’s not forget about the constant inner fights you have with the translators that did the subtitles for those movies.

So, once you start thinking and acting like that, translation becomes an integral part of you. Therefore, you have to give an answer to a very difficult question now – how do you charge for something that important to you?

There are several ways you can turn your passion for translation into money, but you have to think that through very extensively. You’ll be putting a price tag on something that you really love.  Personally, I had a very hard time doing that ever since I started working as a freelance translator.  At first, I tended to underrate my work. I thought that if I can do it, everybody can do it, and I don’t really mind doing it, so I was willing to take whatever amount of money was offered to me - if it was offered, at all. I snapped out of this illusion as soon as the first bills came in, and I revised my way of charging my services.

After that experience, I tried to find golden middle in my pricing. But that was not that simple. There are so many factors that you need to take into consideration when charging for your translation. Obviously, there’s a question of the length of your text. Secondly, it’s very important to know for whom you are doing it. I still cannot charge the same to my “friends” and total strangers. Also, there is a matter of translation difficulty level and, of course, the way of payment. There is also one last thing – your price is one of the most important factors that the new clients consider when hiring you.

In other words, I’m mostly torn between getting properly paid for the work I’m doing and keeping myself in the business. I guess that all freelancers feel the same.

So there you have it! Being a translator is actually all about keeping the balance. I’m always trying to keep the quality of my work very high, but I need to mind the time I invest into the work in order to be time and cost effective. I have to get paid, of course, but I shouldn’t overprice. I should try and work as much as I can, but I shouldn’t take more work than I’m capable of getting done in time. This may not seem as the easiest possible way to make a living.

Then again, there is the other side –the satisfaction of doing a great translation is what makes it all worthwhile. Stumbling upon a difficult phrase or a sentence that bugs you for days and then finding the perfect equivalent in the other language – the adrenalin rush and satisfaction that I feel in those moments is something that makes translation my dream job.

With all that being said, I can really say that living between two jobs and between two languages is a place that I call home.

By: Katarina Mirković