Offers & assignment

Work on LionRapid gets done by people, and this chapter covers how they are brought onto a project. The mechanism is the offer: a project manager sends a concrete proposal — this file, this language pair, this price, this deadline — directly to a chosen translator, who accepts it, declines it, or negotiates. There is no job board: translators do not browse a public list of open work. Every offer is directed at a specific person, and every assignment starts as an offer one side sent and the other side agreed to.

Inside an organization there is a second lane: work can be assigned to a member directly, with no offer and no per-offer billing between members. That flow is covered in Organizations.

The offer lifecycle at a glance

1. The PM picks a translator (see Finding translators) and sends an offer for one seat of the project’s work.
2. The translator is notified, reviews the terms, and accepts, declines, or sends a counter-offer.
3. Counter-offers go back to the PM, who accepts or rejects them; rounds continue until one side settles.
4. The PM confirms the accepted offer — that fills the seat. Other pending offers for the same seat are declined automatically.
5. When the project starts, confirmed offers become assignments and the work proceeds through the project’s workflow stages. The agreed price stays on the offer and is what payment is settled against (see Delivery & payments).

A seat is the unit being staffed: one file’s target language at one workflow stage. A project with two files, each translated into two languages through a translate-then-review workflow, has eight seats to fill. The PM may send offers to several candidates for the same seat — the seat is still filled only once.

Sending offers (for project managers)

You send offers from your project’s assignment panel: pick the file and target language, choose a candidate, and set the terms:

• Role — what the person will do at that stage: translate, review, or proofread.
• Pricing — a pricing model (per word, per character, or per page), your rate, and the currency. The wizard previews the volume and estimated total before you send, using the same volume breakdown the translator will see.
• Response window — how long the offer stays open. There is a platform minimum, a default of seven days applies when you do not choose one, and the window always closes before the project deadline.
• Work deadline, and an optional note to the translator.

Once sent, the translator is notified immediately. You are notified when they respond, and the offer’s status updates live in your offers list. You can cancel an offer you sent as long as it has not been confirmed.

Receiving an offer (for translators)

When a PM sends you an offer, you get a notification and the offer appears in your offers list. Opening it shows everything you need to decide:

• Project information — project name, file, language pair, your role, and who sent the offer.
• Pricing details — the pricing model, rate, volume, and estimated total, plus the volume breakdown (below).
• Deadlines — when the offer expires (with time remaining) and the work deadline.
• Notes from the project manager, if any.

You have three choices:

• Accept — you agree to the terms as sent. The PM still confirms the acceptance before the seat is finally yours.
• Decline — you turn the offer down. This cannot be undone.
• Make a counter-offer — you propose different terms (see below).

If you do nothing, the offer expires when its response window closes and can no longer be accepted.

The volume breakdown

Offers are not billed flat across the whole file. Each row is classed into a match band based on how it was resolved:

• Repetitions — rows repeated within the same job.
• Exact match — rows pre-filled from a 100% translation memory match.
• Fuzzy matches — rows pre-filled from partial TM matches, in three tiers: 95–99%, 85–94%, and 75–84%.
• Copied source — rows carried over from the source unchanged (numbers, codes, content rules).
• New — everything that needs translating from scratch.

Each band bills at a multiplier of the full rate — new content at the full rate, pre-translated and repeated content at a fraction — and the offer’s volume is the weighted sum across bands. The breakdown table in the offer shows words, multiplier, and weighted words per band, so both sides see exactly how the total was computed. A platform minimum applies to translator offers: no band pays below 10% of the full rate, because you at least review every visible row.

If an offer is sent before machine translation has run, the breakdown is an estimate over the full file and is marked as such; it refines once pre-translation completes. Counter-offers keep the original offer’s breakdown — the negotiation is over rate, volume, and total, not the band math.

Negotiating

Countering as a translator

The counter-offer form starts from the current terms. You can change the rate, the volume, or the total price; extend the work deadline (a counter can extend the deadline, never shorten it); set the response window for your counter; and add a note explaining your proposal. You must change at least one field or add a note.

Submitting the counter sends it to the PM, and the offer moves into negotiation — you are notified when the PM responds.

Reviewing a counter as a PM

You are notified when a counter-offer arrives. The review screen puts your original offer and the translator’s counter side by side: the difference in total (amount and percent), the proposed deadline against the original, the translator’s note, and the full negotiation history of every round so far.

You can:

• Accept the counter-offer — the negotiated terms become the agreed terms. Accepting a counter automatically declines all other pending offers for that seat.
• Reject the counter-offer — the translator is notified and may send another counter; negotiation can run several rounds.

Filling the seat

Acceptance alone does not fill a seat — the PM confirms each accepted offer. The first acceptance the PM confirms wins the seat; remaining pending offers for it are declined automatically. A confirmed offer is a commitment: it can no longer be canceled by either side.

When every seat is confirmed, the PM finalizes the staffing and starts the project. From then on the confirmed offers are assignments: the work appears in each translator’s assignments, deadlines are tracked per stage, and the project moves through its workflow. The pricing agreed on the offer is recorded and carried through to payment — see Delivery & payments.

Notifications along the way

Both sides are kept informed at every step: the translator when an offer arrives and when its outcome is decided; the PM when an offer is accepted, declined, or countered. Offer lists update in real time on both sides. See Notifications & chat for where notifications appear and how to manage them.