Sunday, August 7, 2022

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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