Now to the main thing: I’m tweaking my pricing policy for
translations. Some of you will be more affected than others. My base
price will be $1 per minute of material. (ex: a new episode of anime
that’s 24 minutes long will be $24. ex2: a 24 minute episode of anime
that has theme songs that have already been translated and all that
needs translating is 21 minutes: $21.)
NOTE THAT THIS IS A BASE-PRICE AND MAY BE HIGHER OR LOWER ON A
JOB-PER-JOB BASIS DEPENDING ON HOW MUCH DIALOGUE THE MATERIAL HAS.
(for more details, read below)
Base price for editing an episode of anime is approx. $1 per every 4
minutes of material that needs editing. (ex. a 24 minute episode of
anime that doesn’t need the songs edited: $5. ex2. a 28 minute episode
of anime that does need the songs edited: $7.)
NOTE THAT THIS IS A BASE-PRICE AND MAY BE HIGHER OR LOWER ON A
JOB-PER-JOB BASIS DEPENDING ON HOW MUCH EDITING ACTUALLY NEEDS TO BE
DONE. (for more details, read below)
Feel free to ask questions, just be sure to read everything thoroughly
first. Thank you.
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I used to charge a flat rate because everything evened out for me, but
some people consistently provide me with heavy-dialogue items and
others with low-dialogue items and it’s not fair to the people with
low dialogue jobs if the price is flat across the board. Also, more
and more people have been giving me jobs with high volume dialogue so
it hasn’t really been fair for me either.
The new base price of an episode will be the number of minutes the
episode actually is. 24 mins = $24. 17 mins = $17. 28 mins = $28.
If some of the material is stuff that doesn’t need to be translated
(like 3 minutes of credits, or a theme song I already translated),
that portion will be subtracted from the total. I’m not, however,
going to go through and note, “ah, well, between 16:34 and 17:02 the
characters just fought and didn’t say anything so I’ll subtract 50
cents from the total, too.” I mean specifically theme songs – which I
used to include for free with the assumption that this would pay off
after I translated the next 20 episodes in the same series, but people
often give me one-episode OVA or short anime series to translate and
I’m stuck on Japanese-Google for half an hour looking for lyrics, then
another half hour translating a song for free…which isn’t fair. This
is why I now charge for the songs.
If the episode proves to have much less dialogue than usual (as is
usually the case with hentai, action genre, etc.) I will reduce the
price to reflect this. Please note also that if the material is
particularly dialogue-heavy (unscripted interviews, comedy anime, and
new anime tend to be the main offenders) I will raise or lower the
price on a per-job basis. I’m going to go by feel for this, but in
general, if the translation of a 24 minute episode of anime has fewer
than 4 pages or more than 7 pages, the price will reflect this by a
few dollars up or down. SPECIAL NOTE: HENTAI IS GENERALLY LOW-DIALOGUE
AND THE PRICE WILL BE GENERALLY LOWER. However, some hentai has just
as much dialogue – if not more – than regular anime. This is why there
will no longer be a flat-discount for hentai.
Editing is now $1 per every 4 minutes. I will raise or lower this on a
case by case basis, depending on how much needs to be
fixed/retranslated. If there are barely any errors, the edit could go
as low as $3. If there are many missing lines and mistranslated lines,
as much as $12. If you want to make editing costs as low as possible,
have a QC go through first and at least fix the bad English. If it’s
just a matter of wanting me to fill in a couple missing lines or lines
that you believe to be mistranslated, isolate these lines (and
ideally, put these on youtube or something) and I just may do this for
free for you every once in a while. If, however, I have to listen
through the entire episode – even if there turns out to be no errors
at all – still expect to pay a couple dollars for my time.
Remember that you’re still getting a really good deal. I have over 10
years experience translating and I’ve just passed level N2 of the JLPT
(meaning, I could attend a Japanese university….not too shabby.)
Again, I’d be happy to answer any questions you have – just be sure to
read everything through first.
