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Jimenez Julien, the author and maintainer of WordRate

I write the copy, design the screens, ship the code and answer the support mail. If something in WordRate prices a job wrong, it is my name on it.

Portrait of Jimenez Julien

I did not arrive in this trade through a language degree. I arrived through invoices, and through the strange discovery that the people who move meaning between languages for a living are often the worst paid negotiators in the room.

For four years I handled outsourced localization for small software companies that had no localization department. My job was unglamorous: collect the source strings, find translators for six pairs, agree a price, chase the files, and pay everyone. I was on the buying side of the table, and what I saw from there bothered me. The same translator would quote me three different rates in three months for identical work, not because they were opportunistic but because they had no reliable record of what they had agreed with me the last time. Half the invoices arrived without a minimum fee that had definitely been discussed. When a rush job came in on a Friday, the surcharge appeared roughly half the time.

I started keeping the record for them, which is a ridiculous thing for a client to do. My spreadsheet grew tabs: one per linguist, then one per pair, then a matrix of fuzzy bands because the agencies I worked with used different discount ladders. Eventually a Spanish to English translator I had worked with for two years asked me to send her a copy so she could quote her other clients from it. That copy came back to me a month later with her own columns added, and that was the first version of what is now WordRate.

What I learned in the trade shaped every decision in the product. Translators do not want a system that thinks it knows their price better than they do, so WordRate never suggests a rate. It stores what you decided, applies it without editorializing, and shows you what you actually earned per word once minimums and surcharges are counted. Terminology is not a nice extra either. The people I worked with lost hours to arguments about a single term, and losing those arguments quietly damaged their standing with the end client, so the glossary sits on the project record rather than in a separate module you have to remember to open.

I work with operators in this vertical the way I wish vendors had worked with me. Every quarter I sit down with nine translators and two small agency owners, screen shared, and watch them quote a real job in front of me without helping. It is uncomfortable and it is the only reliable way to find the places where a screen assumes knowledge nobody has. Two of those sessions produced the standard line unit for German legal work and the character count option for Japanese and Chinese, features I would never have prioritized from a roadmap document.

I am accountable for three things and I say them plainly. First, that the arithmetic is right: if WordRate computes a quote, that number matches what your rate card says, and when we have shipped a rounding bug I have posted the correction and emailed affected accounts the same day. Second, that your data leaves as easily as it arrives, in CSV and TBX, on any day including your last one. Third, that a human replies to support mail within one business day, and that human is usually me.

Experience and expertise

  • Four years buying and coordinating translation for software companies across six language pairs, including vendor selection, pricing and payment.
  • Hands on work with the analysis exports produced by Trados Studio, memoQ, Wordfast and Phrase, and with the discount ladders agencies build on top of them.
  • Interviews and quarterly working sessions with freelance translators, interpreters who also translate, and owners of language service providers with benches of five to forty linguists.
  • Founder of MLJ, SASU, the French company that publishes WordRate and handles its billing, hosting contracts and legal obligations.
  • Practical knowledge of US freelance business realities that affect this trade: quarterly estimated taxes, net 30 and net 45 agency terms, and purchase order workflows at enterprise end clients.

How this product is built and maintained

WordRate ships small changes rather than large releases. Anything that touches pricing math goes through a fixed test suite of 240 quote scenarios drawn from real rate cards, including the awkward ones: a minimum fee that exceeds the word count total, a rush surcharge stacked on a post editing tier, and character based billing rounded to the nearest hundred. Nothing reaches production if a single scenario shifts by a cent without an explanation.

Editorially, I hold the same line on this website. Every number on the home page comes from account data or from a named source I can produce on request, and when a figure changes I change the page rather than leaving a flattering old one in place. I do not publish customer names without written permission, and the three translators quoted on the home page reviewed their own words before they appeared. No sponsored placements, no affiliate links, no third party advertising trackers anywhere on this site.

Support and product are the same desk. When a translator writes in about a rate card that will not behave, that message goes into the same list as the roadmap, and roughly a third of what shipped in the last year started as one of those emails. Larger requests get an honest no with a reason when they would make the tool worse for everyone else.

Published articles

Everything I write for this trade goes into Source and Target, the WordRate magazine, and these nine pieces opened it.

Contact the author

Write to me at jimenezjulien42@gmail.com with a question, a rate card that behaves oddly, or a request to see the product priced against your own work. I read everything, I reply in English within one business day, and I am happy to look at an analysis log you are unsure how to price even if you never subscribe. If you would rather see the plans first, the pricing section lays out all three, and the questions section covers data handling and cancellation.

Written by Jimenez Julien, publication director at MLJ, SASU, publisher of WordRate. Company details are listed on the legal notice, and the site map lists every page on this site.