Dutch translator job Warsaw- salary?

Hi everyone,

I desperately need someone's advice. There is an international company in Warsaw who probably wants me to work for them but we haven't discussed salary yet. The job is to translate texts from French to Dutch (with the help of a machine translator because I don't speak French).

(My background: I'm half Dutch and half Polish, I lived my whole life in the Netherlands, I studied languages and since ten years I work as a freelance translator. I also speak fluently Polish and English).

What salary can I expect or ask for?

Thanks for your help, hopefully someone can give me advise! Any Dutch people on this forum maybe? :)

Why I have no slightest problem with expressing salary that I'm happy with. I want 12-14 pounds per hour. So if you plan to relocate to Warsaw you will need at least 5000zl pcm. Think how much you would like to earn in Warsaw and say it?

Thanks for your reply. What type of job is it that pays 14 pounds per hour?

If the company is so stingy that they're hiring somebody who doesn't even speak French to translate from French........well they're certainly not going to want to pay even the going rate for translators.

With respect Aniaatje, your English is not fluent because you made a very basic error with 'since ten years I work as a freelance translator'. We never, never say 'since ten years' in English. It should be:

'For the past ten years I have worked as a translator'.

And 'I also speak fluently Polish and English' should be 'I speak fluent Polish and English'.

Your English is very good but not native, which it should be for professional translation services.

Or "I speak both Polish and English fluently." or "I'm fluent in both Polish and English." (not sure why but I really want that 'both' in there, not sure if its American or teacherese....)

Actually I was being a bit harsh on the OP. Afterall she doesn't say she'll be translating into English but I bet she wouldn't say no if she was offered good money to do it :) I've read so many Polish texts which have obviously been translated by a Pole into English with all the literalisms that you would expect and this at quite a high level, government documents and so on. Now this is completely against the idea that one translates into one's native language rather than from. Quite understandable years ago when there was limited access to native speakers of other languages but not acceptable nowadays to have a Pole translating into English. I suppose one of the problems is that there are so few native English speakers who are fluent in Polish but at least the English text should be checked by a native speaker and corrected.

yes there is a whole different way of expression which doesnt always translate very well into English. they need a native speaker to edit.

Not just any native speaker either, but preferably one with some background in translation in general and/or knowledge or Polish.


There still aren't enough native speakers of English with enough knowledge of Polish. There are also problems with training of same (topic of another post/thread).

The problem is more that the low number means demand far outweighs supply and thus drives prices up to a level where companies think that a Pole will be good enough.


As far as I know there are no Dutch people here. But there are a couple of Facebook groups for Dutch people in Poland.

I've always been told that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys.

Atch and mafketis- who said I'm a native English???! I'm not a translator English. I'm a translator Dutch and Polish and sometimes FROM English into Dutch and Polish. This is laughable your whole analysis of my post. My advice for the future: don't draw any conclusions until you know the facts;)

Never trust betting people ;)

Aniaatje if you read the thread properly you'll see that neither I nor Mafketis thought you were a native English speaker nor that you were offering your services as such but regardless of your English it does seem odd that a company wants to hire you to translate from a language you don't know at all and equally odd that you would be happy to do so. The machine translator will tranlsate French into imperfect Polish which you will then knock into shape, so you're not translating from French but from garbled Polish into correct Polish. I would have serious reservations about such practises.

And what does it tell you about the company that's offering the job? Surely they can find a Polish languages graduate with sufficient knowledge of French to do such a translation so why do they want to hire you? Would you really want to work for a company like that? And believe me, at some point they will ask you to translate into English and you will end up doing so. Now this raises issues of ethics.How would you feel if somebody who didn't know Dutch or Polish was translating from those languages? Doesn't it make a nonsense of your own profession and ultimately undermine you? A translator needs knowledge of both the source and target languages.

She is to translate from French into Dutch and not from French to Polish.

Surprisingly enough, I am truly amazed how good these machine translators can be these days. And the more specialized text they have to deal with, the better they are! I'm talking about the Google Translate doing the English-Polish or Polish-English translations of medium-difficulty texts in law or medicine. Of course, the translations need human correction afterwards, but the translators save you plenty of time retrieving many specialized terms (not all) from their base quickly, efficiently and accurately. The machine translators do not seem to be good for common language texts.

Oh sorry, yes, Dutch. But the principle is the same, garbled Dutch into perfect Dutch, not French to Dutch ;) Ziemowit I don't know about Google Tranlsate, I find it ropey in the extreme and it certainly can't cope at all with Irish because I've tried it as an experiment and it cannot do the job properly either from Irish to English or vice versa. It's especially bad on English into Irish. Alot of the translations are not only absolutely incorrect, they're meaningless. Without knowledge of both languages you couldn't make the corrections successfully, I'm certain. But I'm sure there are professional packages that are far better.

Nonetheless I see replacing a human translator with a machine as a very bad thing. It seems that every skill and profession is getting dumbed down to make it possible for every Joe Soap to jump on the bandwagon. Not saying the OP comes into that category, she most certainly doesn't but she will, ironically, end up contributing to falling standards in her profession and ultimately edge herself and her legitimate skills out of the market.

If she is a native speaker of Dutch, she would be readily able to translate garbled Dutch into perfect Dutch. The problem is, however, to contrast garbled Dutch with the French original in cases where garbled Dutch is so dubious that you cannot make it out to perfect Dutch. Thus someone should explain to you what the French text wanted to say. But if you are a specialist in the given area, it shouldn't be much of a problem for you.

That's absolutely the key point.

Haha omg I came here to ask about the salary in Warsaw and what do I get? A whole discussion whether I'm a native or not, from which language to which I translate, a lesson on grammar mistakes and 100 other things. I don't even have the time to read all your replies and I'm closing this thread so don't bother to reply again. Very sad how some people pick on the mistakes of others but they can't judge themselves. In the Netherlands we say: small-minded people have small... ;) Probably that's why you're so frustrated. See ya!

electronics technician, electrican, panel wireman etc

Yes I know it's a mad place isn't it?


You can stop posting but you can't close a thread, only Mods can do that.


Small minded people are sometimes women you know. So now we can add sexism on top of your other sins :)) I'm surprised at you too with you being Dutch. If you pop back here (oh go on, do, you know you want to)you might enjoy this, it's very funny:

youtube.com/watch?v=oSZLGAuJTLQ

Without even slightest clue what it shoud be. My advice 1600zl. You are welcome.


You may close a fridge in your kitchen.


small what? In Poland we use to say cavemen have big...

Ale wiocha.