Yesterday was my first photo club meeting as an official member (for background see this previous post) and it was a great one.
In addition to getting some great feedback on my own pictures, I’m learning critical eye skills by looking closely at lots of pictures other people have taken
One of the key points I took away this time was to be more aware of the “main character” of any picture and really commit to it. I guess I have a tendency to try to add lots of context in both writing and photography, which in the latter case leads to too much extraneous background.
Of course, this is all a matter of taste, which is always up for argument, but I can definitely see the teacher’s point.
For example, he liked the muted color, gloomy lighting, and overall subject of this starflower picture:
But said I should really have just tightened in on it, like this:
He’s right, of course.
At the same time, he liked and had good things to say about most of my pictures, and I even got the “best shot of the month” with this one I have posted before:
As I get older, the more I find that simply learning things is perhaps my favorite hobby. Trying new things and getting better at them. Adding and polishing to the skills I use to interact with the world.
To that end, I’ve been trying to get better at photography. This is not a new thing, as anyone who remembers my aborted attempts to post photos here might know, but it is also not something I’ve felt was making any progress. But that might have been too critical.
I recently joined a local photography club. The first meeting was quite eye opening, because they run it essentially as a monthly photo contest. Members each print out ten or so of what they consider their best pictures. The teacher, a professional photographer with something like 50 years’ experience, goes through each one and makes comments on technique or recommendations for improvement where he sees fit, then chooses the best couple of each person’s shots.
Then, he decides one overall winner for the day and gives them a little prize.
In just over an hour and a half I got a good half-dozen new ideas to bring into my own photography. So worth it for 500 yen a month. For example, the teacher really emphasized what he called sei to do, or stillness and motion. This means trying to show movement, say, in a landscape photograph by slowing down the shutter speed and catching water blurring as it rushes past or the blur of weeds blowing in the breeze. It’s not a universal, of course, but one way to make a photograph stand apart.
And although I didn’t know to bring any printouts, I showed a few of my camera pics through my smartphone and got some excellent compliments.
This one, for example, he loved due to the depth of field and the overall ambience:
I look forward to learning more, and maybe even taking home one of those monthly prizes!
I’m trying lately to build a solid base of knowledge in ceramics, not only of aesthetics and mechanics, but of culture and context as well. This book, part of the Routledge Research in Art History series, is an excellent resource for exactly that.
The image is the abstract work Mr. Samsa’s Walk by Yagi Kazuo.
It features 11 scholarly essays (including the intro and epilogue) examining how the whole ceramics world—creating, seeking, purchasing, and appreciating—changed in post-Meiji Japan. The individual topics are relatively specific, but are well arranged and referenced enough to give an excellent overall grasp of the various issues at play.
The articles are all both rigorous and accessible, with the possible exception, perhaps, of “More than “Western”: Porcelain for the Meiji Emperor’s table” by Mary Redfern, which reads like something an undergraduate in social science might write to fill in a word count assignment. Study, overly erudite, and off questionable insight
Of particular interest to me are the many references to the interplay between attitudes toward other Asian nations during Japan’s colonial and post-colonial periods and the concurrent growth of the mingei movement under Yanagi Sōetsu. There is also a very illuminating reference to the circularity of how ceramic science from Europe influenced Japanese pottery, which in turn went on to influence the British studio pottery wave spearheaded by Bernard Leach.
These incidents fundamentally changed my perception of the mingei movement and Leach; particularly his “translation” of Yanagi’s work into “The Unnamed Craftsman.” The clear biases and, dare I say, agenda they shared makes much of what they say very suspect, even as it touches on some clearly vital issues of the intersection of art and Buddhist ideas.
Anyone who is interested in fort insight into the historical context of his Japan came to be “potter’s paradise,” the tension between art and craft in ceramics, and the roots of Japan’s enormous valuation of pottery and the “living national treasures” that create it would do well to read through this one.
Translator Twitter always sees some kind of drama about rates. Low rates, unclear rates, unpaid rates…
Time is money. Really! Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
This topic never seems to die down, which makes sense, because understanding rates is one of the great mysteries for beginning translators (and, probably, many other freelance fields). For the beginner, it can seem so deeply frustrating when more experienced translators don’t just tell them what a good rate is. I know I felt that way, and those first steps were so difficult that I was genuinely angry at times that no one would just TELL ME what I should charge.
It’s only now that I’m a couple of years into working full time as a freelancer, and successfully supporting my family doing so, that I understand why no one would. The answer is, as frustrating as it sounds, there is no standard. There is no clear baseline that people can share, because a decent rate is in many ways a personal thing. It is based on your own economic needs (cost of living, dependents, etc.), your speed of work, the kind of work you can do, the value you can add to your work, and a variety of other factors.
This is not to say that no one can offer guidance: They can (and I plan to)! Just that no one can offer much in the way of concrete numbers, with a few caveats.
So, how do we do it? We need to start with a few basic principles so that we understand why we’re doing what we’re going to do.
First: Translation is not low-paid work. It is a highly skilled job that serves real economic needs, worldwide. Even in common pairs, any rate that is near minimum wage is, frankly, unacceptable. It’s not economically defensible to pay work with these kind of required skills and talents less than a living wage. Have some pride in your work, and yourself!
Second: Freelancers should charge more than they first expect. Freelance work places a very large economic burden on the worker in terms of taxes, insurance, expenses, unpaid holidays, ad infinitum. A good rule of thumb that is batted around is that a freelancer can expect about the same “take home” pay from double the hourly rate of a full-time employee. So, if a freelancer is earning $100 an hour, that’s about the same real income as someone earning $50 an hour as a company employee.
Third: You are your only advocate. No one gives a rate in freelance translation: you charge it. You decide when to raise it. You decide what is fair for you. If a client is unwilling to pay the rate you charge, it’s up to you to decide if you will lower it, or find another client. This also means that:
Fourth: The burden is on you to understand your work flow. Is your work worth the rate you charge? If you lower your rate, will you earn more by getting more clients, or less because you’re underselling yourself? Are you working efficiently enough to earn enough money at a reasonable rate? Can you work faster/smarter/in a different field? All of this is on you. You’re an adult, and you made this decision to work on your own. All of this is part of that decision.
Fifth: You are more than just your work. Set your rates so that you can live a comfortable life. You shouldn’t be working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. You should be able to rest and enjoy life, not hate your work because you can’t stop doing it for a single day.
So, based on these principles, here is what I find a pretty good way to set your rate.
A: Decide how much money you need to live (per day, or week, or year, etc.). Then, add some more, because I really mean it with those principles. You want to have fun, you want to thrive. You want that middle class dream.
B: Figure out how fast you work, roughly. Naturally, this is going to fluctuate depending on job, field, weather, mood, etc. etc. But you should have a rough idea how much you can translate in an hour, all things considered. For Japanese to English, most people fall between 500 and 1,000 characters an hour.
Now, do the math. Based on the amount you decided in A, figure out an hourly rate, then use B to help set that per character rate. For example:
A= 700,000 yen a month. I work five days a week, 7 hours a day. That’s roughly 140 hours a month, yadda yadda yadda, so I’m looking for 5,000 yen an hour. (This is a conservative figure for a freelancer, as per the second principle above). Don’t forget the long term: I will need holidays, and sick days, and so on. I deserve those, as a human being.
B: if I can translate 500 characters an hour, I should charge 10 yen per character. You will find that this is not at all high for some fields (technical fields, financial fields, etc. will charge much more). But if you’re doing, say, games, it’s very high–largely because people expect faster output. Thus, if you can translate 1,000 an hour, 5 yen per character will get you that same hourly rate.
So, as you can see, it’s simple math but the variables are very wide.
This is also why experienced translators can say a given rate is too low, but not tell you what a baseline should be. It’s because there is a variable math to it, and looking a rate of, say, 1 yen per character gives no path to work out anything like a living wage. Working for such low rates could actually set that translator on a downward spiral, so that they use all their energy just keeping their head above water instead of having reserves they can use to grow and improve. It’s literally better to work at McDonald’s for minimum wage and use your spare time to gain skills so you can become a more successful translator, than work for nothing as a translator and dig yourself into a bottomless pit because you no longer have spare time.
Personally, I aim for 10,000 yen per hour, but so far really only average 8,000. I’m working on gradually raising rates and expanding clients to new, more lucrative fields, since I’m already working as fast as I think I reasonably can (average about 1,000 characters an hour) and I don’t want to work more hours (about 30 a week right now). Thus, my rates range from 7 (my absolute minimum for agency clients) to 12 (for direct clients), with special cases going as high as 18.
To end with, here’s my stab at a baseline: In my opinion, there is no realistic way to support yourself as a translator and live a comfortable life at anything less than 5 yen per character. That should be an absolute minimum for full time work. Naturally, someone out there is disagreeing with me, and that’s fine. I’m just saying, the higher you get above that baseline, the better things will be for you.
Jim Rion - Translator & Writer 