There's a field on almost every agency onboarding form that looks harmless: Country of residence. Sometimes it's phrased as tax jurisdiction, sometimes as "for our vendor records." Fair enough — some of it is real compliance. But I've been doing this fifteen years, and I can tell you when the question is administrative and when it's a fishing line. You learn the difference by what happens next. The compliance version asks once and files it. The pricing version asks, then circles back with "we usually pay a bit less for translators in your region."
That second version is the one I want to talk about.
The cost-of-living myth for a digital deliverable
The logic goes like this: rent is cheaper in Ashgabat than in Munich, so a translator based in Central Asia should be happy with less. It sounds almost reasonable until you look at what's actually being bought. A Turkmen legal translation — a share purchase agreement, an oil services contract, a set of MSDS sheets — is worth exactly the same to the client no matter where I typed it. It goes into the same signed document, carries the same legal exposure, gets read by the same regulator. The value isn't set by my grocery bill. It's set by what breaks if the translation is wrong.
And here's the part that always amuses me: I'm in Dubai. There's no income tax, sure, but a two-bedroom flat here runs more than one in most European cities I could name. The "you live somewhere cheap" assumption falls apart the second anyone checks. Yet the reflex persists, because the reflex was never about my costs. It was about how little the agency can get away with paying. Cost-of-living is just the polite cover story.
I've had a project manager in Northern Europe tell me, with a straight face, that my rate was "high for the market." Which market? The market for Turkmen legal translators who've read a Hispanic Studies MA and can handle a Russian-language rig manual feeding into a Turkmen contract? That market has about the population of a small elevator. Geography doesn't set that price. Scarcity does.
What should actually set the number
Strip out the postcode and three things are left, and they're the only three that matter.
The pair. Turkmen isn't Spanish. There's no bottomless pool of qualified people undercutting each other on ProZ. When an agency needs Turkmen done properly — not machine-mangled, not "my cousin studied in Turkey" — the supply is thin. Thin supply is the whole basis of a defensible rate, and it has nothing to do with where the supplier sleeps.
The domain. A marketing transcreation and an oil-and-gas safety procedure are not the same job priced by the same logic. One rewards a light touch and a good ear. The other punishes a misplaced comma with a shutdown. I price for the consequence, not the word count.
The quality bar you're actually buying. If you want something that passes back-translation, survives a client's in-country reviewer, and doesn't come back for three rounds of rework, that's a number. If you want fast-and-good-enough, that's a different number, and I'll tell you which one you're getting.
None of those variables live at an address.
How I handle the question
I answer honestly where I'm legally required to — invoicing, tax forms, that's non-negotiable. But I don't volunteer my location as an opening bid on my own worth, and I don't let it drift into the rate conversation as if it belongs there.
A few things I do keep firm:
I quote in EUR or USD. Always. The moment you price a global deliverable in a soft local currency, you've told the client the job is somehow local. It isn't. My rate is one rate, and it travels.
I don't run a regional discount. If two agencies pay me different numbers, it's because the work is different or one of them earned a volume arrangement — never because one of them guessed I'd take less based on a map.
When "we pay less for your region" comes up, I answer the substance, not the geography: here's the pair, here's the domain, here's what you're actually getting. Redirect from postcode to product. The agencies worth keeping follow that move immediately. The ones that don't were going to be trouble on payment terms anyway — the same shops that region-price your rate tend to be the ones handing you Net 60 and calling it standard.
Now, the honest flip side, because I hate advice that pretends the world is fairer than it is. Geography isn't always a con. A Spanish translator in a city full of Spanish translators is genuinely competing on price, and no amount of principle changes that math. Location can be real leverage — against you — when you're one of thousands. The escape hatch isn't moving somewhere expensive to look serious. It's being in a pair or a specialism where the pool is small enough that where you live stops being the interesting question.
That's the whole trick. Make yourself hard to replace, and the postcode field goes back to being what it should have been all along: a line on a tax form, not a lever on your rate.