A client once sent me 43 words to translate into Turkmen. A product button, a tooltip, and one error message. Then they asked why my quote wasn't 43 times my per-word rate.
Because the word count is the smallest part of what you're paying for. That's the whole answer, and it's the one nobody wants to hear.
What a tiny job actually takes
Open the email. Read the context, or hunt for the context that isn't there. Ask which product this belongs to, because "Submit" in a payment flow and "Submit" in a support ticket are not the same word in Turkmen. Download the file — maybe it's an XLIFF with three segments, maybe it's a screenshot and you're transcribing by hand. Load it into the CAT tool, confirm the right TM and termbase are attached, check whether the client's glossary has a preferred form for the one noun that matters. Translate. Run QA. Export. Rename the file to their convention. Write the delivery note. Log the time. Invoice it, or batch it for the month-end invoice that takes its own twenty minutes.
The 43 words took four minutes. Everything around them took forty.
This is the part the per-word model hides. Word count scales the translating. It does not scale the setup, the context-chasing, the admin, or the context-switch cost of dropping whatever I was doing to handle a "quick one." Those are roughly fixed per job. A 5,000-word file and a 43-word file both cost one setup and one delivery. The small one just has nothing to amortize that cost against.
So I charge a minimum. Mine covers roughly the first chunk of any job regardless of count — the floor below which it isn't worth opening the file. Nothing clever about it. Every trade with a call-out charge understands this. A plumber doesn't bill you for the washer; he bills you for showing up with the van.
Where I bend, and where I don't
I'm not rigid about it. The minimum is a tool, not a principle to die for.
If it's a good agency sending me a steady diet of work, and a tiny patch lands between two real projects, I'll fold it in. Add it to the next invoice at word rate, skip the minimum, keep the relationship warm. That's not weakness. That's me recognizing the account already amortizes the overhead across the month. The setup cost of a 43-word job is low when the TM, the glossary, and the client's quirks are already in my head from last week.
What I don't do is waive the minimum for the account that only ever sends tiny jobs. Because that pattern is the whole business, not an exception to it. If every request is 30 to 80 words, there's no large file coming to absorb the overhead. The small jobs aren't the crumbs around the meal. They are the meal. And a meal of crumbs needs to be priced like one, or you're subsidizing someone else's workflow with your afternoon.
I also don't waive it for the "urgent, tiny, can you just—" request that arrives at 6 p.m. Small plus urgent is the most expensive combination there is, because it buys a context-switch at the worst possible moment. If anything that one goes up.
The tiny-job pattern is a tell
Here's the part worth arguing about. How an agency handles the minimum-charge conversation tells you more than the rate itself.
The good PM already knows. They write "this is under your minimum, that's fine" before I say a word, or they batch the small changes and send them weekly so I'm handling eight patches in one setup instead of eight setups. That PM understands that my overhead is real and that managing it is partly their job too. I'll move mountains for that PM.
Then there's the one who treats the minimum like a negotiation. "It's only 40 words, surely you can just do it." That phrase — just do it — is the tell. It assumes the only work is the typing. It assumes my time has no floor. And it usually comes from the same account that sends twelve of these a month and acts surprised each time that the invoice has a number on it.
For a rare pair like Turkmen, this matters more than it would for Spanish. My volume is thin by nature. I'm not going to get a 20,000-word manual every Tuesday to keep me busy and keep the average rate healthy. A lot of Turkmen work genuinely is small — a UI string here, a certificate there, a label on a bottle. If I let all of it slide under the minimum, I've built a business that's busy and broke. The rarity that should be leverage becomes the thing that keeps me cheap.
So the minimum isn't me being difficult over 43 words. It's me pricing the forty minutes you can't see, and paying attention to who tries to argue them away.
The button said "Submit," by the way. In the end we used Ugrat. Took one question to the client to be sure. That question was part of the job too.