Alphatrad is a translation agency in France for whom I’ve done quite a lot of work recently. But they have a payment policy which I still haven’t properly appreciated yet.
They expect me to quote the number of words I intend to charge as soon as I submit the project to them. Now of course it is easy to do an automatic word count with a Word document, but I can’t do it with Excel or Powerpoint files; I have to count those words manually! And sometimes there is text that I don’t know whether to charge for or not, such as dates and contact details separated from the main body of text… and whole chunks of repeated material.
On Wednesday I’ll be attending the first of Chris Cardell’s twelve “Ultimate Marketing” webinars. Isn’t that exciting? And I’ve never even been on a webinar before. I hope my computer won’t pack up in the middle of it! The price was high (£1180 plus VAT) but I bought this because I was never happy with how much (or rather, little) I knew about Pay Per Click and website visitor tracking. And I don’t want to feel too dependent on translation agencies (even if I have worked for translation agencies all over the world). In this program I will get the chance to have discussions with other business owners and even get the chance to have my questions answered by Cardell himself.