A Kiwi in Beijing

Are you an experienced Chinese translator or a rookie? Probably, the question of how much you should charge is nothing new to either of you. Worrying if you have set a rate higher than the buyer’s expectation makes you restless – “Will they be scared away? Should I lower my rate?”. Questions like this are purely torturing. On the other hand, if you set a rate that you are confident lower than other project bidders, you may feel bad. This may hard your business in two possible ways: 1. reduction of income, of course; 2. Lower bids lead clients into thinking inferior services, which harms your brand.

So charging is actually an art that few people can really balance the good and the bad of.

The suggestion I would like to give you is that let your current workload decide it – if you have gained enough clients to get yourself busy with, you can consider rising your rate a little bit; If you are currently hungry for new work, then lower your bid to make some money to pay your house rent.

But that is not very helping, because in real word ,things are much more complicated and cannot be solved by 2 or 3 sentences.
For example, a client comes to you with a very low budget but promises this is going to be a long term project. I definitely recommend you to take it because your income will not be just the money the client has in his pocket right now – a long term relationship is gold.
Another example is that the same small-budget client comes to you again, with a short-term project but you definitely can learn something from the project, like industry knowledge, you should take it too, because learning is gold like a long term relationship.
So the art of charging for translators is never easy, you need to consider the real world situation around you and think about the real interest like an economist.