A new agency emailed me last week with a "short test" attached. It was 1,470 words of a shareholders' agreement. English into Turkmen. No pay, of course — "standard procedure to assess quality before adding you to our roster."
That's not a test. That's a Tuesday.
I've been doing this fifteen years and I still take tests. I'm not one of those people who writes blog posts declaring that any self-respecting professional refuses them outright. That's posturing. A test can be reasonable. But you have to know the difference between a genuine evaluation and a sliced-up billable job wearing a test's clothes, and the tell is almost always in the length and the specificity.
What a real test looks like
A real test is short. Two hundred, maybe three hundred words. It's a passage chosen because it has traps in it — a date format, a measurement, a bit of marketing fluff that doesn't survive a literal rendering, a term with two defensible translations. The agency isn't trying to get free output. They want to see how you handle the corners.
For Turkmen that matters more than for most pairs, because they can't just run my work through a reviewer pool. There often isn't one. So a good vendor manager uses a short test to check the things they can check even without a Turkmen speaker: did I keep the numbers right, did I respect the formatting, did I query the ambiguous source term instead of guessing, did I deliver on time and in the file format they asked for. A 250-word test tells them all of that. They don't need 1,500 words to learn whether I can translate.
So when the sample is short and the instructions are real — a style note, a glossary, a deadline — I do it. It costs me twenty minutes and it signals that the agency actually has a process. Those are usually the ones that pay on time too, which is not a coincidence. An agency that respects your time at the test stage tends to respect your invoice at net-30.
The tells of a job in disguise
Now the other kind. The length is the first flag, but it's not the only one.
Watch for continuity. A genuine test is a self-contained passage — it has a beginning and an end. A chopped job starts in the middle of clause 14.3 and ends in the middle of clause 16. "Capitalized Terms shall have the meanings set out in..." — you can smell that it's page four of something. Nobody writes a 1,400-word evaluation sample that opens mid-contract.
Watch for the file. A real test comes as a clean DOCX or a short string table. A disguised job comes as an XLIFF with 90% matches already locked, or a portion of a PDF with the header cut off so you can't see the client name. If they're hiding the context, there's a reason.
Watch for urgency. "Can you complete the test by tomorrow morning?" A test has no deadline that matters. A job does. When someone wants a 1,500-word "test" back in eighteen hours, you're looking at a delivery they already promised a client and are now trying to source for free.
And watch for the split. I've compared notes with colleagues in other rare pairs and we've found the same source text handed to three or four of us as separate "tests." Each gets a different chunk. The agency stitches the free output together and ships it. That one is rare but it happens, and once you see it you never trust that agency's "onboarding" again.
What I actually do
My rule is simple and I'll give it to you plain: I translate up to about 300 words free. Past that, I quote. Not aggressively — I'll say something like, "Happy to do a short sample at no charge; anything over 300 words I'd handle as a standard paid assignment, and you're welcome to use it to evaluate my work." Half the time they come back with a proper short test. The other half they go quiet, which is its own answer.
For the 1,470-word shareholders' agreement I replied with exactly that. They wrote back that it was "just the test size our QA team uses." I asked whether their QA team had a Turkmen reviewer. No answer. That told me everything about how any future dispute over my work would go.
The other thing I've learned: a test result means less than people pretend. Agencies that put you through a test and then never send work are common — you pass, you go into the database, and the database is where vendors go to be forgotten. So I don't treat the test as a golden ticket. I treat it as a cheap read on whether the agency is organized, honest, and staffed to actually use a Turkmen translator. The test tells me as much about them as it tells them about me.
Short and specific, I'll do it today. Long and vague, you're not testing me — you're billing a client with my unpaid hours, and I'd rather spend those twenty minutes on someone who plans to pay me for the next thousand words.