How to choose which translation jobs to accept: capacity and due-date math
Short answer: accept the set of files whose combined fee, less direct costs, is highest and that you can still finish by their due dates with the hours you really have. Hours before a deadline are the scarce thing, so a well-paid file can be a bad choice if it takes the hours two better files needed.
A worked queue
Ten offered jobs, one translator giving the queue 6 hours of real work per business day. Fees run from $275 for a short email batch to $1,400 for a 14,000-word annual report that takes 16 hours; each row has the business day it is due by.
Accepting requests in the order they arrived fits 4 files and earns $2,990 net: it takes files in arrival order until the larger, better-paying ones no longer fit.
Biggest fee first fits 3 files and earns $3,360: it takes the $1,400 annual report and the $1,300 software strings job, then adds the court filing and has no hours left for anything else.
Best net per hour first fits 7 files and earns $3,278: many small wins that crowd out the two big files that pay more together.
The best set accepts 5 files (41 hours) and earns $3,555 net, or $86.71 an hour. That is $195 more than the best simple rule.
Five files are turned down. The contract translation would earn a place at a fee of about $485 (it asks $425), the medical device IFU at about $810, the annual report at about $1,470, the email batch at about $347 and the low-rate post-edit at about $425. Those are the numbers to counter-offer instead of the fee offered.
What to feed it
Hours: the whole file, from reading the source through translating, terminology research and self-review. Track a few finished files to calibrate this.
Hours per day: what you can truly give the queue after existing clients, admin and the unexpected.
Direct cost: CAT-tool or glossary licence share, a reviewer's pay, per-job platform fees. Not your own time.
Due day: business days from today, where 1 means the end of today.
Check your language-pair competence, any certification or sworn-translation rules, confidentiality terms and any agency agreement first: some require you to take or decline jobs for reasons the arithmetic cannot see, and work you can do competently comes before any optimum.
Questions
How do I decide which translation jobs to accept?
Compare whole queues, not single files: a set is deliverable when, for every due day, the hours of the files due by then fit in the hours you have by then. Of all deliverable sets, the best is the one with the highest total fee less direct cost. The picker finds it exactly for up to 16 files.
Is taking the biggest fee first a good rule?
Not reliably. A big file often takes the hours two good files needed before the same due date. On the worked queue it earns $3,360 against $3,555 for the best set.
What should a file pay to be worth taking?
The picker prints, for each file it turns down, the fee at which the best set would include it. That is the number to counter-offer, or the number to quote the next time an agency sends the same kind of job.