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They have GOT to be kidding...
Mar. 27th, 2003 06:59 pmI got this in the e-mail today:
Assuming the price quoted is in euros, and that the euro is having a good day, the stated rate is about 2 cents per word, US.
Further, assuming one works regular office hours (i.e., 2080 hours annually, for the U.S.), 18 months amounts to 3120 hours. Dividing the job by the hours yields an average rate of 641 words per hour, or better than 5,000 words per day, five days a week, with no vacations, for 78 weeks.
That's pretty impressive speed. And to think it must be sustained, day in and day out, for 18 months? That's equally impressive.
What's not impressive is the monetary result. All that effort nets $102.56 per day, as a self-employed, independent contractor (which means that - if you're working in the US - about $15 of that $100 goes to pay Social Security tax, after which the entire sum is subject to income taxes, but I digress...).
The people offering the job are nuts, especially since the subject matter is listed as "human sciences," which I assume will involve a heavy medical content.
In the same e-mail, I see a similar job quest for a Russian-German translator, same subject, same volume of source text, but with a deadline of 14 months. Ye gods.
These people really are nuts.
And if I'm right about the medical angle, I certainly would hate to be the patient whose life depended on the quality of the translation. You get what you pay for.
Cheers...
Nous recherchons traducteur parfaitement bilingue pour un traduc. russe-français, 2.000.000 mots. Délai: 18 mois. Suite à plusieurs demandes, nous avons décidé d'élever le prix par mot source à 0,015.If I understand this correctly, off the top of my noggin:
We seek a perfectly bilingual translator to translate 2,000,000 words from Russian into French. Deadline: 18 months. After several inquiries, we have decided to raise the price to 0.015 per word of source text.Oh, but I can imagine the course of those "inquiries." And I cannot imagine what the original rate offered might have been.
Assuming the price quoted is in euros, and that the euro is having a good day, the stated rate is about 2 cents per word, US.
Further, assuming one works regular office hours (i.e., 2080 hours annually, for the U.S.), 18 months amounts to 3120 hours. Dividing the job by the hours yields an average rate of 641 words per hour, or better than 5,000 words per day, five days a week, with no vacations, for 78 weeks.
That's pretty impressive speed. And to think it must be sustained, day in and day out, for 18 months? That's equally impressive.
What's not impressive is the monetary result. All that effort nets $102.56 per day, as a self-employed, independent contractor (which means that - if you're working in the US - about $15 of that $100 goes to pay Social Security tax, after which the entire sum is subject to income taxes, but I digress...).
The people offering the job are nuts, especially since the subject matter is listed as "human sciences," which I assume will involve a heavy medical content.
In the same e-mail, I see a similar job quest for a Russian-German translator, same subject, same volume of source text, but with a deadline of 14 months. Ye gods.
These people really are nuts.
And if I'm right about the medical angle, I certainly would hate to be the patient whose life depended on the quality of the translation. You get what you pay for.
Cheers...
