Clarity glimpsed...
May. 5th, 2006 07:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpIf Feht and I are typical of translators, then perhaps it's not unusual to start thinking those nasty "will I ever get work again?" thoughts after two days of no phone calls and no email inquiries.
Yesterday, though, in a conversation with Feht, I experienced a kind of epiphany regarding clients in general. I guess it's something of a flashback to the days when I was an engineer, specifically, that ugly semester when we dealt with statistics, both as a separate subject and as the backbone of advanced thermodynamics. I'm going to have to work on regaining that clarity, as it has all become murky again, so for now, I'll just set down some background thoughts.
There are translators out there who have decided that their time is worth a certain rate - typically in the premium range - and they stick to it, come what may. The common justification for such an approach is that any likely reduction in volume is made up for by the premium nature of the rate (if you lose 40% of your work after bumping up your rate by 50%, you're making more money and working fewer hours, all other things being equal).
However, as we all know, it's a tough world out there and other things tend not to be equal. As I mentioned yesterday, New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority has apparently foregone human translation for machine translation, presumably as a cost-cutting move, despite the fact that the resulting translations are, by the MTA's own modest admission "imperfect" (which is a very much like describing Hurricane Katrina as a "tropical squall").
On a page devoted to electric car evacuation procedures, for example, the term "Long Island Rail Road" is rendered as "Длинняя дорога рельса острова" (literally - and it's hard to do this because the endings make no sense: "Long road of island rail"). Or another example, from the same page (devoted, by the way, to safety issues):
If your competitor is not a machine, that tough world comes in the form of someone else who is "hungrier" than you are, and willing to work for less. They may not be as good - and typically, they aren't - but clients are generally not in any position to judge translation quality, unless it is truly and spectacularly bad. Indeed, some translation customers have become so used to dealing with text that blatantly reads like a translation, that they exhibit a modicum of confusion when handling a translation that sounds as if it had been written in the target language to begin with.
On the other hand, it's the rare client who is not perfectly sensitive to issues of cost, and quite often, a poor translation bought for half price is preferred over a good, yet comparatively expensive translation.
So what's a translator to do? For a while, yesterday, I thought I knew, or at least, I glimpsed a path through the swamp.
But now, with 12,000 words on my plate due next Wednesday, I can't seem to refocus on the issue.
I should count my blessings.
Cheers...
Yesterday, though, in a conversation with Feht, I experienced a kind of epiphany regarding clients in general. I guess it's something of a flashback to the days when I was an engineer, specifically, that ugly semester when we dealt with statistics, both as a separate subject and as the backbone of advanced thermodynamics. I'm going to have to work on regaining that clarity, as it has all become murky again, so for now, I'll just set down some background thoughts.
There are translators out there who have decided that their time is worth a certain rate - typically in the premium range - and they stick to it, come what may. The common justification for such an approach is that any likely reduction in volume is made up for by the premium nature of the rate (if you lose 40% of your work after bumping up your rate by 50%, you're making more money and working fewer hours, all other things being equal).
However, as we all know, it's a tough world out there and other things tend not to be equal. As I mentioned yesterday, New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority has apparently foregone human translation for machine translation, presumably as a cost-cutting move, despite the fact that the resulting translations are, by the MTA's own modest admission "imperfect" (which is a very much like describing Hurricane Katrina as a "tropical squall").
On a page devoted to electric car evacuation procedures, for example, the term "Long Island Rail Road" is rendered as "Длинняя дорога рельса острова" (literally - and it's hard to do this because the endings make no sense: "Long road of island rail"). Or another example, from the same page (devoted, by the way, to safety issues):
Whatever the emergency, rest assured that your LIRR crew will keep you informed and assist you in any way necessary.(Believe me, the Russian is a terrible mishmash of Cyrillic words and ultimately, a waste of pixels.) It reminds me of a photo Feht sent me recently, of a machine control panel, where every label was not translated, but transliterated (i.e., English sounds written using Cyrillic letters).
Аварийная ситуация, остальные убедили что ваш экипаж LIRR будет держать вас после того как он сообщен и помогать вы в любой дороге обязательно.
If your competitor is not a machine, that tough world comes in the form of someone else who is "hungrier" than you are, and willing to work for less. They may not be as good - and typically, they aren't - but clients are generally not in any position to judge translation quality, unless it is truly and spectacularly bad. Indeed, some translation customers have become so used to dealing with text that blatantly reads like a translation, that they exhibit a modicum of confusion when handling a translation that sounds as if it had been written in the target language to begin with.
On the other hand, it's the rare client who is not perfectly sensitive to issues of cost, and quite often, a poor translation bought for half price is preferred over a good, yet comparatively expensive translation.
So what's a translator to do? For a while, yesterday, I thought I knew, or at least, I glimpsed a path through the swamp.
But now, with 12,000 words on my plate due next Wednesday, I can't seem to refocus on the issue.
I should count my blessings.
Cheers...
