second commission arrives

My second commission arrives. It is translation work. The client wants me to calculate my rate per line of text. This seems bizarre, as the number of lines in a document is as much a function of typography as it is of content.

For my first commission, which passed off entirely satisfactorily after two and a half intense but enjoyable hours at the screen, I charged by the hour, but by the word would have been fine too. I return to my archive: 40euros/hr, 2700 words (which happened to be arranged in 215 lines on this occasion), 2.5 hours.

So I guess about 100 lines an hour would be OK. Which means—assuming everyone's been too lazy to alter their M$Word preferences—doing work for a rate of between 20 and 50 centimes per line. This would be about 2 - 4 centimes per word, which doesn't seem that much, as to turn out 1000 words/hour for several hours would be strenous, whatever the nature of the text.

Update: the going rate, for rendering French texts into the English, as published by some French translation body, is apparently 5ç/word.