 Hello. So today I'm talking about pricing and I'm talking more specifically, I've talked in the past about how you should never try to price yourself lower than anyone else in order to get more clients. There are so many reasons not to do this. First of all, you're always going to find people who can price themselves lower. You're never going to earn a decent living. It's almost impossible to charge someone a low price now and then charge them a higher price later in the future. And so you're going to have to try to leverage that to get new clients, but you're going to have to do it anyway. It's really bad. I've talked about it at length in different videos. So go check them out and you'll see what I feel about pricing yourself lower. And the idea usually is when you're dealing with translation or pretty much any freelance business, you'll start off maybe not at the highest level, but as you gain more experience, more clients, more referrals, more ratings, more feedback, more testimonials, stuff like that, then you can start charging more and more and more and more and more. And so suddenly you're charging say double what you were at the beginning and life is better than it was before. Today I'm going to make an argument where maybe you don't want to be charging more. And in fact, you should not be shooting for charging more. And it's going to involve a calculation. So I have my whiteboard and but we'll get into it. So as an example, let's say I I have certain translations I'm very comfortable with. And these tend to be say financial translations. I mean, they are financial translations. It'll be like quarterly reports, annual reports, stuff like that. That you know, the shareholders reports, so basically financial translations from Italian into English. And if I do these, if I get in the zone, talked about this in another video, very important to get into the zone, what to uni task. So if I'm doing that, then I know I can crank out 3000 words, you know, at least 2000 words a day. But if it's something I'm comfortable with, I worked on before I can do 3000 words a day on this stuff. And yeah, and call it a day. And so that's not bad at all. On the other hand, if I have something I'm not comfortable with for me, that will be medical. I've tried medical in the past. And literally for medical translations, I've I'll get this thing of medical translations. And I'm literally looking up every single word because I have no idea what what half the names of I mean, how you translate the names of the drugs, the names of all the, I don't know, amino acids there, the hemoglobin's there, the types of said a refill acid, no, nuclear hydrogen sulfide, some whatever, you know, stuff like that. And so I'm looking up every single word. And then after that, I'm looking up how they, if they work correctly together, because sometimes you tear a ligament, sometimes you pull a ligament, you rupture a ligament, you did, you know, I don't do this, that any other. I'm not a doctor. And what I figured out eventually was I have no business doing medical translations. But the few I did, it was, it was crazy. And it took me so long. And I would literally be there for something that had four or 500 words, it took me all day, because I had to look up every single word more than once, you know, look up every single word first and then see how it all worked together. If it did work or if, first of all, if I could understand what they were trying to say, if I could convey it correctly in English. And anyway, it was a mess. It was a disaster. So keeping that in mind, let's, you know, let's do a process. Let's say you're charging for translations that you can work on no problem. You find them pretty easy. Let's say you charge, I don't know, something lower, a six cents a word. And, you know, but you can do them pretty easily. Like I said, 3000 words a day, boom. And let's say the, for the harder ones, quote unquote, medical translations or whatever it might be, you know, some ultra technical something, you're able to charge more because it's ultra technical or whatever, let's say double 12 cents a word. If you can charge 12 cents a word, okay, I need to catch up. If you can charge 12 cents a word and for the double ones, but you're going to be translating a whole lot less and you're going to be translating, say 500 words a day, which is what I could do with my thing. You're going to be there all day and it's going to wipe you out and you're going to do those 500 words a day. And the other one, the other one's going to wipe you out too, but you'll do 3000 words a day. And hopefully I'm doing the math right. I'm going to show you. Well, here, first of all, actually, here, I won't show you yet. I'll show you my calculation first. So scenario one, six cents a word, 3000 words a day, scenario two, 12 cents a word, 500 words a day, scenario one, and that one day, you'll be making 180 bucks, scenario two, and that one day, you'll be making 60 bucks. So you see what I mean? Here, if you choose the option that pays you less, you're going to be buying yourself more beers at the end of the day. And this is something to keep in mind when you are, you know, when you're trying to get paid more for a translation, chances are if you get paid more, it might take you longer than something that you do that you're comfortable with and you do very well already. And so maybe keep in mind this calculation every time you do accept a new job. I should, by the way, you know, for those of you who think it's a bit exaggerated, I mean, you know, if I change this six cents a word to 2000 a day, you're still left with $120 per day, which is still double 60. I mean, you know, and you can tell there the math checks out. But so anyway, it's even if you cap it at 2000 words a day, it's still better in that sense. So at this point, so you should be doing this calculation whenever you have a new translation, see if it's worth it for you or not. You can also take it one step further. So you can say, okay, this is gonna this is a waste. I'm gonna do 500 words every day, make maximum 60 bucks a day, and it's not gonna be worth it for me. Or it could be something that as I keep doing it, I get the hang of it more and more. So I do 500 words today. But next time I'll be able to do a bit more and a bit more and a bit more until I'm doing pretty much the same amount. Now, at least for medical for me, that's never the case. I don't touch medical anymore, because I had no business touching it in the first place. And so I don't do that. But if it's something else, like if it's, let's say it's an annual report, but instead of for the US, it's for, I don't know, New Zealand. So the first time it'll take a while because I'm not used to all the, all the terminology and and, yeah, basically terminology, they're counting procedures and what they use and how they do it. So that will take a while. And yeah, so it'll be something like this, you know, the first time around. But if I know if it's a regular job, if I know, thanks to that, I can get more jobs. Then once I get used to it, I'll get a lot better at it. And once I know what I'm doing, I'll be able to do 2000 words a day at this new rate. And so keep this in mind. Think to yourself, is this something that I'm going to get better at over time? Or is it not? If it's not, and you realize that at the end of the day, you're making less money than you would otherwise, you should probably not be doing those types of translations anymore. Stick to what you're good at and what you can improve at and get better at because that's what will earn you more as time goes on in the long term and in the short term. And so anyway, it's just something to keep in mind. These are moments when you should maybe not be trying to make the maximum amount of money, you know, per word, which is usually how you get paid as a translator, because it comes out to less money overall in the end. And anyway, I hope you found this useful and hopefully it's a useful calculation you can use next time you're trying to figure out what to translate. And if you did, please don't forget to click like thumbs up because that always lets me know what works and what doesn't. Don't forget to subscribe. Tell your friends to subscribe. Tell your enemies to subscribe. And I'll see you in the next video. Thanks. Bye.