Fuzzy Match Discount, Below Minimum Wage? Fabric Counter

2026-10-29

Marta is standing at a fabric counter on a Thursday at 10:40, holding a corner of grey linen, when her phone buzzes against the cutting table.

It's the agency. She reads the first lines with the sales assistant already unrolling a metre.

"Please note our updated rate policy: repetitions at 30%, fuzzy matches 75–94% at 60%, 95–99% at 30%. Kindly confirm for the attached project."

The linen is lovely. She can no longer feel it.

The sentence you type with your thumbs

"Sure, send me the files," she types, because that is what she always types. Then she deletes it. Then she types it again.

The agency is not rude. The project manager is friendly, and the work is steady. That is the trouble. Steady work makes it hard to say what the nagging thought is, which is this: Am I actually earning less than minimum wage per hour on these jobs?

She doesn't know. She knows the per-word rate on paper sounds fine. She knows the last project felt like a lot of hours for a small invoice. But "felt like" is not a number, and a feeling is a hard thing to bring to a negotiation.

"Do you want it cut straight?" the assistant asks.

"Sorry, yes. Two metres."

The maths you keep for later

If you translate for a living, you probably know Marta's thought. Discounts for repetitions and fuzzy matches sound reasonable in the abstract. The software already did part of the work, so why pay full price?

But the software did not read the segment. It did not check whether the 85% match quietly changed the meaning. It did not notice that the repeated sentence now sits in a different paragraph with a different tone. You did, and that took time, and the time doesn't show up anywhere on the invoice.

So the evenings go like this. You finish the job. You open the PDF the agency sent with the analysis. You look at the number at the bottom. You think, that's what I get? Then you close the file, because you have another deadline, and the question goes back into the drawer where you keep it.

It costs something to keep that drawer closed. You say yes a little faster than you'd like. You stop asking what a job really paid. A small voice says you're not quite running a real business, because a real business would know.

What the counter does to a thought

There's a queue behind her now, a woman with a roll of curtain lining and a toddler who wants to touch the buttons. Marta pays, takes the bag, and stands outside by the bike racks.

She doesn't answer the agency. She does something she hasn't done before. She scrolls back through the last three projects from this client and tries to remember the hours. The first one she can half-reconstruct. The second one, she can't. The third was the one with the rush delivery on a Sunday, and she isn't sure whether she charged the rush fee or only meant to.

It's not the discount that frightens her. It's that she cannot say what the discount costs her, because she never wrote down what any of it was worth in the first place.

That is the turning point, and it's a quiet one. It isn't "I'm being cheated." It's: I could just know.

Not a lecture on negotiation, not a script. Just a plain picture, job by job: the words, the matches, the discounts, the hours, and what that comes to per hour. Next to it, what the same job would have paid without the discount. If that picture existed, she could say "yes", or "yes, at this rate", or "not at this rate", and mean it.

A different Thursday

Imagine the same morning, a little later in the story.

The email arrives. Marta is still at the fabric counter. But this time she doesn't feel the stomach drop, because she has the last six projects in one place, with the real hourly figure beside each one. She knows which agencies land where. She knows this one pays well on fresh text and thinly on repetition-heavy files. She knows which invoices are open and which client has been stretching to sixty days.

She types a short, calm reply. She asks about the analysis, proposes a rate she's comfortable with for a file like this, and sends it. Nothing dramatic. Her voice is steady because the numbers are hers.

Then she goes back to the linen.

The rest of the week is just a week. She doesn't open the project analysis at 22:30 to feel bad about it. She doesn't dread the next email. Maybe she takes the job, maybe she doesn't. Either way, it's a decision, not a reflex.

A small, quiet next step

If this sounds familiar, you don't need a new way of working or a harder negotiating face. You may only need the numbers to sit somewhere you can see them.

That's why we made Per-Word to Real Hourly – Translator Rate & Job Tracker, an Excel tracker for translators. It turns per-word rates into real hourly pay, keeps track of CAT discounts and rush fees, and shows which agency pays late. It is a tool for organising your own figures. It doesn't replace a tax professional, and the decisions stay yours. If it doesn't help, there's a 30-day money-back promise, no questions.

You can look at it here, whenever you like: Per-Word to Real Hourly – Translator Rate & Job Tracker

The linen, by the way, is going to become curtains. Marta is going to stand in her kitchen, hold up the first panel, and think the room finally looks finished.

That's the feeling we like to imagine for the rest of your week too.

An illustrative story, written with AI assistance.