![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Confirming my suspicions...
Feb. 3rd, 2011 05:23 pmAn 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
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
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 = $4.33to 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
