Small Translation Projects or Large Translation Projects?

Some translators prefer to work on small projects, while others prefer larger ones.

Some translators prefer to work on small projects, while others prefer larger ones. Of course, there are issues associated with different project lengths, such as job satisfaction, income potential, and quality control.

Income Potential

When it comes to income potential, it’s up to you personally whether you decide to offer a discount due to the volume of the translation project; but, if you’re always pretty busy with your translation work then it’s not necessary to offer discounts. And perhaps that’s the greatest advantage of working on a large project; that you’re guaranteed to earn a large amount of money in one hit, rather than earning different, smaller amounts for smaller projects. With large projects, you also have some economies of scale; such as one client, one invoice, one glossary for the project, and so on. However, it seems that when the word count is high, there’s also a greater chance that your client will suffer from sticker shock when they discover the total price of the translation. It doesn’t seem to matter what the per-word rate is; for larger projects the final figure seems to shock some clients. For that reason, it’s sometimes easier to work on short documents and charge higher rates, than to work on larger documents and be forced to deal with clients’ reactions to the amount being invoiced.

Job Satisfaction

There’s nothing more exciting than landing a huge project on a topic that’s really interesting. You wake up in the morning knowing what your day’s agenda is and you’ll probably find there’s a little spring in your step because life looks pretty good. On the other hand, however, if you land a big project and things don’t go well, your days can be excruciatingly painful. Your project won’t be over in a day or two, or even a week or two, and you have to face this manual, or book, or another project that you wish you’d never heard of for the next month! So the job satisfaction aspect of winning a big contract could go either way.

Quality Control

It’s not always easy to manage quality control on large projects. Regardless of how great your memory is for terms, if you’re using CAT tools and you’ve been working on a project for a few weeks, you’re probably going to get that feeling of ‘haven’t I read this before’, and it can be difficult to locate the section of text you’re thinking about. And when it comes to abbreviations, like (say) PO or Purchase Order, which way did you decide to go? Did you decide on abbreviations or was that just something you were thinking about?

So, large translation projects can be really great if they’re interesting, they generate a decent invoice, and they’re not so long that you get bored and lose the enjoyment of your work.