Translator: Am I Earning Enough Per Hour? The Alumni Lunch

2026-10-21

The question over the soup

The table is by the window. Rain on the glass, the smell of tomato soup, six people from your old translation course who haven't all been in one room for years.

Everyone is catching up. Someone went in-house at a software company. Someone moved to subtitling. Someone has twins.

Then Katrin, who now manages a localisation team, turns to you with a friendly face and asks, "So what do you actually make per hour these days?"

You open your mouth. Nothing useful comes out.

You know your per-word rates. You could recite them in your sleep. You know which agency pays what and which direct client says thank you. But per hour? That is a different sentence, and you realise you have never said it out loud.

"Oh, it varies," you say, and reach for the bread.

It does vary. That is true. It is also a very comfortable way of not knowing.

What "it varies" hides

On the tram home you do the maths in your head, badly.

A good-looking rate on a PO. But the agency applies a fuzzy-match discount you accepted without a fight. The file arrived as a scanned PDF, so you spent a long time fixing it before you could even start. The reviewer sent back forty comments, and you answered each one politely, unpaid. A rush job went out on a Saturday, and the surcharge was never discussed because you didn't want to seem difficult.

Each of those is small. None of them feels like a decision. Together they are a quiet tax on your own work, and you pay it without seeing it.

That is the part nobody says at a lunch like this. You love the work. You are good at it. And you are not sure whether you are being paid for it, or just kept busy by it.

Some months you feel rich because the invoices are big. Other months you feel poor and can't point to why. The feeling swings, and the numbers behind it stay out of sight.

The shoebox of "probably fine"

Back at your desk, you try to look.

The word counts are in one place, the invoices in another, and the hours are in your head and a few notes in your calendar. A project that felt like a tidy two-day job might have stretched across five. You can't say for sure.

You notice something you have been avoiding. When you say "I'm fully booked," part of you hears "I'm doing well." But busy and well-paid are not the same thing, and you have never had a way to tell them apart.

It costs you more than money, too. It costs you the calm voice in a rate conversation. When a new agency sends its standard terms, you can't say "that doesn't work for me" with any weight, because you don't know what "work" means in your own numbers. So you accept. Then you resent it a little. Then you accept again.

The small shift

The change, when it comes, isn't dramatic. Nobody hands you a new career.

It starts with one plain idea: every job gets a line. The words, the discount, the rush fee, the time it really took, and who it was for. Not a system to run your life. Just a place where the real picture can gather, so you can glance at it instead of guessing.

And once the picture exists, a few things quietly become visible. Which agency's "good rate" turns out thin once the discounts and the extra hours are counted. Which small direct client is, hour for hour, your best work. Which late payer keeps sitting on your money, and which ones don't.

You don't have to do anything dramatic with that. You can just know it.

An ordinary Monday, after

Picture the next Monday. Coffee, a half-open window, a new file in your inbox from an agency you work with often.

You look at the word count, the deadline, the discount they've applied. Before you answer, you already have a rough sense of what this kind of job really pays you per hour, based on the last ones like it.

Maybe you take it. Maybe you reply, calmly, with a rate that includes the rush fee, and you don't apologise in the second sentence. Maybe you say no to a job that would have cost you your weekend for less than it looks.

None of these is a big move. But they come from a place of knowing, not hoping.

The next time somebody at a lunch table asks what you make per hour, you smile and give a number. You are not boasting. It is simply yours, and you know it.

And the evenings change too. You stop doing sums in your head on the tram. The knot that arrives every time someone says "hourly" loosens, because you already looked.

If you saw yourself at that table

If the question over the soup sounded familiar, there is a small Excel tracker made for exactly this: Per-Word to Real Hourly – Translator Rate & Job Tracker. It turns per-word rates into real hourly pay, keeps track of CAT discounts and rush fees, and shows which agency pays late.

It comes with a 30-day money-back promise. If it doesn't help, you get a full refund, no questions. It is a tool for organising your own numbers. The decisions, and any tax questions, stay with you and your tax professional.

An illustrative story, written with AI assistance.