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atlanticwords
Community Member

Payment per word count

Hi

I am a freelance translator. I have a client interested in hiring me to translate documents as they come in every week within 24 h. It’s going to be an ongoing contract and I would like to charge per word count. We agreed about a price but since we don’t know how much work it is going to be we can´t handle it as a fixed price contract. But the only other way I find to invoice the client is per hour. Is there a way to invoice per word count?

 

Thanks

Cordula

10 REPLIES 10
matthew-thrush
Community Member

Hey Cordula,

 

Something that I do with clients when this same situation occurs is to have them fund the Escrow account with a minimum amount that you know you'll write. Meaning, if you know you'll at least write say 50,000 words and your rate per word is $.02, then you would have them fund the Escrow with $1000. Then, the rest is funded as you write it or know what the total word count comes to at the end. This ensures that you're getting paid upfront in some form before beginning the work. Also, I've found this works well with Milestones as you're writing. 

 

I hope this helps. Very exciting for you to have found a long-term client. 🙂

 

Matthew

Hi Matthew,

I saw your answer about billing for word count, but being new to Upwork, I'm not sure how I do that.

 

Any hints on how I actually do it within Upwork?

 

Thanks in advance

Martin

jr-translation
Community Member


@Cordula H wrote:

Hi

I am a freelance translator. I have a client interested in hiring me to translate documents as they come in every week within 24 h. It’s going to be an ongoing contract and I would like to charge per word count. We agreed about a price but since we don’t know how much work it is going to be we can´t handle it as a fixed price contract. But the only other way I find to invoice the client is per hour. Is there a way to invoice per word count?

 

Thanks

Cordula


A: Just ask your client to create and fund a new milestone everytime he sends you a new text.

B: Create a milestone for an amout X and once you reached it, request the payment to be released and create a new milestone.

Okay, thanks for the advice.

Martin

atlinguist
Community Member

Cordula, I am assuming that the content and text types will be similar as well, so why not just work out how many words (roughly) you can handle in an hour and then multiply your hourly fee? When I do my bidding for jobs, I usually have to guess how many words it will be because the client doesn't know, and so I have an estimate for each type of text at hand (technical or scientific with lots of terminology research, website or marketing copy requiring a bit of imagination and fiddling, poetry requiring a certain amount of thinking time or historic research, and so on...)

Cordula's post is from last year and it seems the contract never materialised (or at least not on Upwork...)

 


@Petra R wrote:

Cordula's post is from last year and it seems the contract never materialised (or at least not on Upwork...)

 


 But I guess Martin cares for some answers.

Thanks for the answers.

Yes Jenn ifer, I'm just looking for the best way to manage this within Upwork. The current sysem is a little cumbersome, but can be made to work.

 

Thanks

Martin

7e8b2fba
Community Member

hlo

 

40ae3f4d
Community Member

I am interested please give me the content i will done my work at time