Confirming my suspicions...

[alexpgp]

An unsolicited email crossed my router today, for a huge into-Russian job. I don't work into Russian, but the rate offered intrigued me. I knew it was low, but could not determine how low by inspection, because "X per page" made no immediate sense to me.

Most payments I deal with involve word count. I started in this business doing translations based on a source word count that was, of necessity, based on the kind of technology that was used to calculate column-inches of text back when Linotype represented the apex of publishing technology (i.e., a ruler and a pencil). The advent of computers made it easy to count words, and since determining source word count from paper documents was so cumbersome and prone to error, counting the number of words in a target language file became the standard way of charging for the work.

In other countries, work is paid on the basis of lines or pages of standard "size." Today's into-Russian project specified a payment of "120 to 130 rubles per standard page," where a standard page is defined to be 1800 characters, including spaces.

After finishing the work I had received early this morning, I rummaged through my archives to find some representative group of assignments and recorded the word count and character count so conveniently provided by Microsoft Word. (By the way, throughout this post, what I refer to as "character count" should be interpreted as including spaces.)

Excel helped create the following x-y scatter chart using my data.


There's nothing really unexpected in the linear nature of the line on the graph, and the result supports the idea—one that goes back to the early days of telegraphy—that a "word" in English consists of five letters plus a space, or 6 characters in all (although technically, the number is more like 6.3 according to the data of my informal analysis).

Today's exchange rate between rubles and dollars (obtained by entering the search string "exchange rub usd" into Google) is just about 30, so the maximum offered rate is

130/30 = $4.33

to be paid for

1800/6.3 = 286 words,

which allows us to determine a target word rate of

$4.33/286 = $0.0152,

or basically a penny-and-a-half a word.

Not my cup of tea.

I'll just file away that 6.3 chars/word figure. It may come in handy some day.

恭喜发财

Comments

[skipperja.livejournal.com]

Well, on Facebook I would click the "Like" button. :)

[velvet-granat.livejournal.com]

*sigh*. $4 per page.

I had a discussion with a Moscow-based agency a month ago about translation into English, they were offering $9 per page (3 cents per word). I'm told that this is the going rate there, many freelance translators into Russian are happy to take $7 per page (2 cents per word). All I could say is "sorry, my cost of living is over double of yours, no thanks." Time to learn another language, methinks... perhaps Scandinavian. They pay well.

Nice formula, though, I might nick it :)

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

LOL!

Thank you!

Cheers...

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

I cannot vouch for the quality of whatever is translated into Russian, but almost uniformly, consumers of into-English work done by native Russian-speakers (who haven't spent scads of time in English-speaking countries) at best face having to become used to text that reflects non-native thinking patterns, with excursions into the backwaters of complete unintelligibility.

Cheers...

[velvet-granat.livejournal.com]

Oh, I hear you, loud and clear. The agencies seem to realise that too, as there seems to be a bit of a market for into-English proofreading by native or near-native English speakers. Funny thing, they often pay more for editing than translating!

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Well, in my neck of the woods, editing typically is paid at about 25% of the translation rate, which tempts entirely too many agencies to have the work translated by incompetents who agree to work for next to nothing, after which they approach competent translators and (try to) get them to provide usable text at "editing" rates.

Indeed, I've often argued that correcting a translation generated by a translation memory system such as Trados, in which a page of text may consist of between 10 and 20 sentences, most if not all of which contain what would be considered a major translation error if committed by a human translator, is not editing and should not be paid at that rate.

But—what do I know?

They really pay more for editing than translation down under? ;^)

Cheers...

[velvet-granat.livejournal.com]

Erm, I think I was unclear. I was talking about the Moscow rates and agencies - some of them pay equivalent of 2-3 cents per word to translators, and then the same to native-English editors. Go figure.

I don't actually get much work from the down under agencies. First, they demand a specific certification which I haven't got around to getting yet (this year, when I have a spare grand), and second, even with that piece of paper the Russian work they get is minimal - 90% documents. And third, there are only about 50 translation agencies in the entire country (there probably more than that in Denver alone!) A tiny market, all in all.

[dz.livejournal.com]

Lets wait for the offer from china to do some into-chinese job. :)

[kehlen-crow.livejournal.com]

This is very interesting. They still pay for pages with that same number of characters, yet I have no idea what is the rate in the publishing house I work for except 'low', because for me, the point is learning to speak English better... the only upside currently is that we are paid in $ exchanged into roubles at current rate, and seeing as the rate is climbing ever higher, so is this pay.