Wednesday, July 26, 2006

0,046 EUR/word????? ... pure madness ...

Well, I would not have wondered about 0,06/word - that is a price you often see in Italy from an agency ... but today there was that hilarious job from a new agency that got a fairly normal price per page from me ... I got a mini-job from them 22 words ... well, being it only 22 words I did not bother about the price (it costs more to create the job, write the invoice etc ...) ... sending the file with the 22 words back I noted the price of the p.0. 22 words for 0,046/EUR = 1 EUR .... now imagine all the work around 1 EUR .... the agency has to create a job, has to invoice the customer, has to check that the customer pays, has to check my invoice, has to pay .... I have to create an incoming job, write an invoice, have the accountant work, have to pay VAT and taxes .... all in all almost half an hour of work for what? 0,50 EUR net income???????????????????????

I just couldn't believe .... but even for the rest .... imagine a translator getting 0,046 EUR/word from which he has to pay expenses, taxes etc .... so if he is happy he has 0,023/word net income (from where insurances phone etc. need to be paid). Now according to many colleagues it is not possible to do much more than 2000 words per day (a normal working day) ... that means 46 EUR/day ... well cleaning the neighbours house I would earn more than that .,...

But let's go ahead with that calculation ... a normal month would bring 920 EUR with loads of responsibiliy ... imagine: companies depend on our doing a good job ... now if I go and work in an office I get 1200 EUR and do not even have half of the responsibility, no problems if I am ill, no private insurances necessary, no accountant necessary .... these would be there for me just to spend them and I would not even have to care about contacting new customers etc ....

Where's the world going? Sorry, but I am just too shocked ... or are all translators people just doing things for fun ... and not to live on???

Well: I deliverd that 22 words and asked them to simply delete that ridiculous p.o. ... at least it gave me the reason to write a blog ;-)

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