Every business, whatever its nature, including your translation business, is pursuing a number of objectives to guide its activities and mandate its actions. One of the main business objectives is to be profitable. While there are other important factors -growth, adding value to the company, etc.- without profitability it will not be possible to sustain your translation business in the medium to long term.

What exactly is a big job? How many words merit my accepting a discount? And just what kind of percentage discount can we be expected to accept?

To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, before I became a translation and interpretation student I used to translate some videogames in my free time. This allowed me to get to know the "ins and outs" of this type of project. When I was tested to work at Nintendo as an English-Spanish translator, I felt very comfortable thanks to my previous experience with such texts.

I have seen too many colleagues stammering when working out an estimate, stopping at every morpheme, really suffering in a process that should be completely natural. My physiotherapist does not hold back when quoting his fees, why should I?

There is nothing new about the idea that words are not all there is to reality, but that reality often cannot be changed without them.