How do hourly rates work? How can I increase mine?

We always compensate our editors for the time they spend translating. To ensure fair payment, our hourly rates vary based on the editor's efficiency and the target language.

Unlike other online work platforms, we never take a cut of your earnings and pay them to you in full.

What does this mean for me?

Your hourly rate is calculated on a daily basis by an algorithm that analyses your speed and quality. This algorithm then gives us an hourly rate, which is based on the tasks you completed the previous day. If you don’t work one day, your hourly rate will carry over until the next time that you work.

How can I improve my hourly rate? 

• Watch your speed

The speed with which you need to complete tasks to access higher rates varies across content type and language pair, but as a very rough guide, you’ll need to be completing average-length emails of 200-300 words within five minutes to access the upper hourly rates.

We don’t expect you to be perfect straight away - it’s possible that you won’t have worked with machine translation before. It'll come with time.

• Improve your quality 

It’s vital that you watch your quality as this feeds into your hourly rate, too. Don’t forget that you’ll be evaluated every few months, and the tasks selected for rating could come from any time since your last evaluation.

• Skip or unclaim tasks (within reason)

There’s no shame in occasionally skipping or unclaiming a task. If you get a task up that you think is too difficult to complete, or that you think you won't be able to finish in time, simply skip or unclaim it and report it to us. Someone else may pick it up who feels more comfortable working on it, or we’ll be able to look at it at Unbabel HQ. Please be aware that the habit of skipping tasks excessively may put you further down the list when we’re looking for editors to work on special projects or looking for new reviewers for your language pair.