Doing the maths to get paid


The Christian Holy Scripture says that the “worker is worthy of his (or her) wages”. I think you will agree with this obvious statement irrespective of your religion, if any. What's more, even most clients (fortunately) agree with it. But sometimes you have to walk the extra mile to arrive at the bottom line that you should get paid.

In Poland, as opposed to other countries, many clients still pay by the standard page, which is often defined as 1800 characters, including spaces. Some count the source text, some the translated text.

One of my clients pays by the standard page, but they recently discovered the savings that CAT tools can bring  them, and so they wanted to pay less for repetitions, fuzzy matches and internal fuzzy matches, still paying by the page. It is a good client and a regular payer, so I though to myself, why not.

SDL Trados Studio provides excellent analysis reports, even with character counts, but unfortunately the software counts characters without spaces. I believe it is fair to assume that to arrive at the number of characters with spaces you need to add the number of characters to the number of words. This was my first step. Then I divided the number of characters by 1800 to obtain the number of pages (or page fractions) for each match category. The rate for a page of new text (without matches) had to be reduced by the percentages I usually apply to clients who pay by the source words.
Then I multiplied the pages by the rates and added the results from the last column. This way I arrived at the number to put on my invoice.

Sounds complicated? And it is. But the client liked it. And the invoice is in the mail.  :-)


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