How much to charge for proofreading?

Hi,

I've been doing a lot of translation for a company for a while now, I've charged $0.02 per word and I was happy with that. However, now he just asked me if I could proofread something. Sure I can, but I have no idea how much I should charge. He's saying it's a good translation so I wont have to do any big changes. What is a good price per word?

 

It's often difficult to know what to charge people. A good idea I think, would be to work out how much you're charging per hour roughly for the translation (by figuring out how many words you usually translate per hour) and then work out how many words roughly you can proof read per hour, and apply the same average hourly rate that you are charging for translation.

The average reading speed per minute (in the USA) is apparently around 250-300 words, or 15,000 - 18,000 words per hour, so I'd guess you'd want to cut that by at least half, or maybe even more - to give you time to read carefully & correct, and then apply the same average hourly rate that you charging for translation.

Hope this helps

Cheers

Kev

 

I guess all depend on the length of article or paper. 0.2 per word is not bad

 

$0.05/word is the standard now days.

$0.02/word is rate for 2006.

 

Proof reading is quicker than translation and so rates tend to be lower. Your translation rate however is very low and so doesnt give you much space.

 

All the above is sound advice. However, I would say this - the next generation of text analysis tools will seriously affect your proofreading margins - we use software in-house to do exactly that. It will probably go the same route as rewrites. At one point a rewrite was expensive.

 

I used to work in a translating company. According to my experience, the price of proofreading is about half of translation.

 

I guess all depend on the length of article or paper. 0.2 per word is not bad.

 

I think all depend on the length of article or paper. 0.2 per word is not bad .