Repetition discount for proofreading job

fabiomcaldas

Hello TOM people,

Would you give any sort of discount for a proofreading job? I have never heard or have never been approached by a translation agency that required a TM grid discount for a proofreading task.

Would you say this is common practice in our industry? See the agency explanation below:

"As most terms should be saved into the Translation Memory for each project, you therefore shouldn’t need to spend as long reviewing these terms as you would in the absence of a TM. As the proofreader, you are still required to check all terms and the file as a whole, however we expect you would only spot-check those that are repetitions/fuzzies whereas words with no matches would require a full proofread."

Well?

eleonorang

I have never heard of proofreading discounts either.

A good (and frequent) alternative is agreeing on an hourly rate beforehand. Eventually, you (the proofreader) will spend more time on no match-segments but will proceed more quickly on full and fuzzy matches so, in a way, the different "difficulty levels" will still be taken into account.

Dmitry

eleonorang agreeing on an hourly rate beforehand

This! Repetitions or not, your job as a proofreader is to read the text in its entirety. Some segments will take longer to proofread, some will go faster. Repetitions have nothing to do with it. Hourly rate is the most adequate unit of measurement (not words).

So you have to estimate how many hours you'll spend and bill those hours to the agency. You also need to understand your own proofreading skills and pace. This will help you give an accurate and fair estimate.

fabiomcaldas

eleonorang

Dmitry

Don't I know that?!! ?

My problem isn't how to price myself, the question was "Do you think this is common practice in our industry?"

The obvious answer is "No"! But I was thinking that maybe professionals from other parts of the world could have experienced a request such as this, apparently not.

There are more, it isn't only 100% repetition discount that they want but a whole TM grid discount must be applied (mandatory and not negotiable). Payment: 0.03 USD words per source word. The agency is from the UK.

Thank you for participating!

Dmitry

fabiomcaldas Do you think this is common practice in our industry?

I don' think it's a common practice, Fabio. I've never heard about CAT discounts for proofreading, so I don't think that's normal. ?