Translation entry: experience ≠ price

 

[blank yellow tag*]

The arguably most important and clearly most difficult question faced by newcomers to the translation business is how much to charge. There is so much uncertainty regarding the “ideal” price that many newbies simplify the matter to the equation “experience equals price”. I would argue that actually no real connection exists between experience and price nor should exist. However, there is a correlation between experience and work load, i.e., new translators require more time to produce a proper translation.

For better or worse, experience or a lack of it is often not reflected in the quality of the translation. Specifically, quite a few translators produce almost the same poor level of work in terms of accuracy and language throughout their long seemingly successful careers, apparently learning nothing over the years. By contrast, many new translators with the knowledge, drive and language required for a task produce excellent work. Since a customer seeks production of a project, not an employee, years of experience or lack thereof are simply not a relevant factor in setting a price. What counts is the ability to produce a proper translation. Therefore, there is no requirement to factor in a discount for being new to the profession when setting the price.

Many starting translators believe that the best way to jumpstart a career is to start with low prices and build up the clientele. This strategy works well with standard goods when quality is more or less uniform among suppliers. However, translation, as a service business, is far more dependent on the skill of the supplier rather than the raw material. Thus, translation purchasers, lacking other criteria, tend to link quality to price. In other words, a low price means a rougher translation. This perception means that beginning translators should set their prices towards the average, not low, segment of the market. Furthermore, new translators need to be aware how difficult it is to raise prices, with it often requiring years to persuade clients that the translator is worth the rise to normal rates. As they say in Hebrew, there is nothing more permanent than the temporary. Therefore, quoting average prices allows new translators to make a decent income from the start even if it may take a little longer to build up the clientele.

The most difficult question regarding pricing for a new translator is how much to ask or, if you will, how much is average. As there is no market price (see here), any average is at best an estimate for a specific market. In many countries, translators cannot lawfully openly discuss rates, making the whole matter even foggier. However, I would recommend privately asking translators in the market for which the quote is requested and taking into all factors, including whether the buyer is an agency or end client, the country of origin and the difficulty of the translation as well as the number of words, of course. Some open sources of specific rates are proz.com and agency sites, keeping in mind that the large LSPs tend to have a high profit margin and pay the translator very little, relatively. Pricing is an art, not a science, and requires some investigation work.

It should be noted that experience does increase efficiency. As in most professions, volume leads to greater efficiency up to a certain point. Experienced translators have seen certain text countless times and do not think how long to translate it. They handle many the technical issues, including document preparation and communication, much more effortlessly. They also know what type of errors they are prone to commit and actively look for them. As a result, veteran translators can properly finish a project faster, taking into account all elements of the process. For a new translator, it would be wise to insist on longer deadlines in order to allow for this inefficiency until the processes become automatic. Rushed jobs often lead to the long-term loss of customers. In other words, nobody loses a client because they need extra time but do lose one if the result is poor. Therefore, those lacking experience should factor this need for sufficient speed into their quotes by insisting on realistic deadlines.

Everybody starts at zero. It does not mean that new translators must or should discount their work because of their lack of experience as long as they can provide a proper translation. Experience may allow a person to work faster but not necessarily more skilfully. Of course, quality takes time, the more so for a beginning translator. Deadlines have nothing to do with pricing. In short, for those entering the translation business, charge a professional price but do not take on too much work at a time.

 

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Basic instincts – professional choice

 

[dog with bone in mouth*]

My introduction to the occupational importance of basic instincts was through accompanying a housemate as he looked to purchase a dog for duck hunting, a popular pastime in the Pacific northwest, when I lived in Oregon many years ago. Curiously, he brought the bone of a duck wing with him as he checked out three small puppies from the same litter. He placed the bone a few meters from them and their mother and watched their reaction. One looked at the bone and at his mother and could not decide what to do; the second approached the bone and then raced back to his mother; the third then ran to the bone, put it in his mouth and proudly brought it back to his mother. My housemate then declared of the third: “Now that one is a hunting dog”.

I am one of many in many of my generation that had full choice of profession but found it very difficult to decide “what I want to do when I grow up”. I tried many professions but found myself somehow incapable of succeeding in them even though I did learn something from each of my assays. I took many assessment tests in any attempt to help identify my path to greatness or at least to financial independence but the results were irrelevant, if not completely strange. One test even suggested that I become a nurse, completely ignoring my sensitivity to suffering and lack of ability to multitask. Eventually, after a valuable period in sales, I became a teacher and then a translator and editor.

Looking back, I now view the issue of career selection is much less related to specific skills, which are attainable, but instead to basic tendencies to achieve certain goals even without the actual knowledge of how to do so. In other words, each profession requires its practitioners to strive for a difficult, sometimes even impossible, goal. People with the specific ambition find it natural to invest time and effort to reach that goal while those lacking it cannot excel in the long term.

To demonstrate, I will make some blanket statements about several professions that I attempted as well as those in which I succeeded. While my sample basis may be too small, I met sufficient numbers of people practicing these jobs to reach these conclusions, allowing for exceptions of course. First, attorneys, or advocates as they say in the UK, have an unusually strong push to win. The payoff may be money, status or fame but in  my experience with attorneys both from working in a law firm and in the court, they have an ever-present, however expressed, desire to come out on top. This tendency generally has a far less positive impact on their marriages but that is another story. By contrast, top salespeople are addicted to the adrenaline of getting a person to buy something and receiving money for it. They go hand in hand as either one by itself generally does not provide a sufficient thrill. Health care professionals must have the emotional need to help people. The stress involved in healing people is so high that, without it, it would be impossible to survive long in the profession. Academic researchers, a group I met later in life, seem to seek systematic order. They want to believe in and understand how everything is connected, even if they are not. In my mind, their ideas are fascinating but not always practical.  Lacking the proper attitudes, I did not fully stick to any of these professions but admire those that are good at them.

I did become first a teacher and then a translator and editor and now fully understand why. Regardless of the age of the student, teaching above all involves the mission of sharing knowledge. All dedicated teachers want their students to understand and learn. Teachers identify success as the grasp, however imperfect, of the material they are attempting to teach while failure is when it appears that nothing “got in”, regardless of the cause. As in healthcare, without the strong internal need, it is impossible to survive the tribulations of teaching in the long term. As for translation, as compared to writing, which involves creating an idea, and editing, which involves polishing the form, translators get their high from faithfully and almost magically transferring ideas from one language to another. We receive an immense, even exaggerated, feeling of joy from “I got it”, namely achieving a seamless representation of the original text. Professional translators almost cannot help spending ridiculous amounts of time trying to understand the original and find an equivalent word or phrase in the second language even when they know that the customers will not appreciate the effort either in words or money. Such insistence is second, almost first, nature for them. In contrast, editors love perfection in language far more than in content. OCD and perfectionism are not impediments for editors but instead advantages. Time and effort are not inputs to be balanced with only the result being of importance. I admire that approach even thought I recognize its dangers. As I possess these tendencies to one degree or another, I can succeed in these fields.

I realize that my “conclusions” are not academically proved or even provable. They may be based on an overly limited sample or incorrect assumptions. Yet, I sense common patterns of basic instincts that quite often reflect professional stereotypes. In other words, a person seeking to identify a top professional should seek signs of such an instinct in addition to the formal criteria. More importantly, a person trying to pick a career to enter should ask what situations have provided motivation to go above and beyond standard effort. The answer is the basic instinct and a requirement for being an outstanding professional in a field.

 

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An august August business bucket list – or what to do about nothing

[summer fruit*]

Children love the month of August as it is by far the “funnest” month of the year, filled with enjoyable activities and no homework. Business people, by contrast, have entirely different sentiments. As normal people go off to “les vacances” in some sunny spot with water to play in, many entrepreneurs by choice or necessity try to ring up some business in August, especially the second half. The results are hit and miss, with a lucky few having more than an average month and others waiting for the phone to ring, door to open and/or email to “ping”. However, instead of regretting this down period, this relatively quiet month is the perfect opportunity to accomplish many important tasks, leading to a more successful remaining year. Here is a short bucket list of achievable goals for August:

[ketchup servings]

Catching up

a.       Examine your books and identify customers that owe you money.

b.      Get your account books up to date

c.       Compare your numbers

d.      Tie up any outstanding correspondence and resolve open issues

e.       Conduct an inventory and make decisions on items to reduce or remove

[rainbow in horizon]

Building for the future

a.       Check out a software program that you are considering

b.      Find a new marketing outlet

c.       Review your website

d.      Improve your CV

e.       Create marketing activities

f.        Talk to a key employee

g.       Work on online profiles

h.      Take a webinar

i.        Watch a YouTube video on a subject you like

j.        Work on an upcoming project

[pelican on pier]

Just for you

a.       Go see a movie in the middle of the day

b.      Go to a beach pool, or spa for a day

c.       Have lunch with a friend

d.       Spend time with your family

e.       Spend a whole day on the sofa with a good book and air conditioning

f.        Go to the doctor/dentist you have been avoiding

g.       Get away for the weekend

h.       Cook the fancy dinner you have always wanted to try

i.        Go hiking or camping

I know that the month is already half over but better late than never. Clearly, it is impossible to achieve everything on the list but, still, achieving a few will shed a new light on the “season of pickled cucumbers” as Berliners used to say. It is possible to make something out of nothing, which is definitely an august August perspective.

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Pictures via Pixabay 

To dream the impossible dream – achievable deadlines in translation – what translation buyers should know

 

[stopwatch*]

There is a concept in law involving purchase of stolen goods stating in some cases a buyer should have known that the price was so far below market value that it was too good to be true. In the competitive businesses, including translation, service companies and providers reach to achieve an edge over their competitors by lowering prices and reducing deadlines. As I have already discussed market price in a previous post, I will now focus on practical deadlines for translation tasks, delving in the elements that determine the minimum work time, to provide translator purchasers the information needed to know when a translation agency or provider promises the impossible.

To clarify, I will be relating to human translation, not machine translation (MT), which involves running a series of document through a program linked to a neural memory or another memory system, often based on publicly available existing translations. Depending on the languages involved and content, the results range from almost human text to completely confusing garbage. As part of the process, a human editor then either does a simple readthrough to ensure that the content is identical or a complete workover to also refine the language, depending on the needs of the client. This translation is relatively inexpensive and allows translations of large bodies of text in a short period, albeit with sometimes mechanical language. For example, attorneys can use this method to decide which foreign documents among a large discovery require exact translation. The human time element in MT is the editing process. Anybody interested in more information about MT should consult an expert.

By contrast, human translation involves, by definition, significant time investment by a translator. To begin at almost the end, as far as I know, full time technical translators can effectively produce a first draft at a pace of 1500-4000 words per day on their own. Admittedly, a small percentage of translators use voice-to-text technology such as Dragon Naturally Speaking and achieve more. Granted, there are a few people with superhuman strength and concentration can do more for a short period. However, expecting a proper translation beyond that number is unreasonable. The actual amount is influenced by the actual languages involved, format, content and purpose.

Languages differ, among other ways, in terms of word structure and syntax. The more the two languages resemble each other, the faster it is to translate them as the switch from language to language is smoother and requires less effort. For example, Spanish and French have similar word building strategy, roots and syntax, allowing the translator to use the source language as a model for the target language, saving much mental energy and time. By contrast, some languages apply different word-building strategies. For example, German combines elements into a single noun, creating words that require multiple words in English while Hebrew integrates the preposition and article (the) into the noun, creating a meaningful difference in word counts, sometimes as much as 25% in German to English and 50% from Hebrew to English. If the roots are different, the translators must invest more energy in identifying the correct term. Most importantly, when languages use different sentence syntax strategies, translators must read the entire sentence carefully and create an equivalent in the target language. For example, English is a word-order language, i.e., subject-verb-object, while Russian is a case language, i.e., the grammatical function of a word is marked by an ending, rendering word order a stylistic element. As a result, translating from Russian to English involves constant reordering of elements, a jigsaw puzzle, which is a very tiring process over time. Thus, the combination of languages affects the practical amounts of words that can be translated in a day.

Another important factor is the digital format of the document. Clearly, Word documents without significant formatting element allow the fastest translation. If the document is in Word and merely involves texts in paragraph without additional elements, the translator merely translates the received document, most efficiently in a Computer Aided Translation (CAT) tool such as MemoQ or Trados. Repetitions, identical or almost identical sentences, can speed up the process.  However, a significant percentage of documents are in .pdf or .jpeg formats, which require conversion to Word to be able use a CAT tool. Depending on the complexity of the formatting, quality of the image and type of font, the difficulty involved converting those formats to Word range from quite easy to impossible. The lower the quality of the resulting the Word document, the more time is required after translation to restore the original formatting. In the worst cases, the translator must manually create the form, a laborious process. This issue is aggravated when working in language pairs involving reverse directions, e.g., Hebrew and English as it often creates additional formatting issues before the document can be sent. When calculating time to complete a translation, the translator buyer should take this conversion time into account (as well as provide the best possible source documents, in Word preferably). Sometimes, the translator company or provide has templates, but that cannot be taken for granted. Thus, non-Word formats add time to the process of translation.

The most important element is content. The simpler, more general the content, the more words a translator can produce in a day. Clearly, people do tasks that are routine and do not require extra thought work more efficiently. In technical translation, the texts tend to be narrower and more specialized, requiring extra effort and time to ensure quality. For example, legal pleadings use very specific terms. Translators often invest significant time making sure that their choice of words is correct as they are paid for being 100% sure, no less. Clearly, experience and knowledge allow the translator to work quicker but, as mistakes can have serious consequences in such field as law and medicine, precision and caution are required, which dictates a certain pace. On the other hand, if the document to be translated are standard forms, it is possible that the translator has previously translated all the difficult terms and sentences, accelerating the translation. In general, translation of specialized content takes more time.

The purpose of a translation also has an effect. If a translator only needs to faithfully reflect the content in the original, the translation task is quite straightforward. However, if the translation client wants the translation to create a persuasive document, a marketing document of some kind, the translator has to carefully consider not only the content but also how to express the same idea in a manner that would persuade readers of the target document. This process requires time and energy, further reducing the maximum number of words.

Having produced the translation, the translation agency or provider has not finished the task. QA is an essential part of the task, as recognized by the relevant ISO standards. Depending on the length and complexity of the document, QA can take from 25% to 50% of the translation time. Clearly, longer documents provide opportunities for more mistakes, requiring very careful checking, often many times. As it is quite difficult to maintain the required concentration without breaks, lengthier documents require proportionally greater time. Furthermore, if the translator had to enter numbers manually as in a financial report or cope with very complex sentence structure as in a contract, QA becomes as significant in terms of time as the actual translation since poor results can have serious consequences. Therefore, the translation buyer should be aware of the QA time element.

Proper translation involves sufficient time, which can vary quite significantly depending on the number of words, languages, format, content, purpose and required level of QA, not to mention the specific translator. Even allowing for this variance, there is a minimum time to produce a professional translation. If a translation agency or provider promises a finished product of 5,000 words of technical translation in one day or 40,000 words in a week (yes, I have seen such requests) by a single translator, buyer be aware. There are impossible dreams, which can become the buyer’s avoidable nightmare.

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