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Translation - art & business » Business issues »
Currency confusion
Thread poster: Jesús Marín Mateos
Jesús Marín Mateos
Jesús Marín Mateos  Identity Verified
Local time: 13:30
English to Spanish
+ ...
Aug 22, 2007

Hi guys,
I just wanted some feedback from you. I provided an agency via e-mail with my rates in "£" in front of the figure.........and the agency agreed and sent me a project......so far so good...I start working on the project but check their email and there the figure I quoted is shown without any sterling symbol and I thought I may have forgotten to write it......double check my "sent items" and the pound "£" symbol was indeed in my e-mail.........but not in theirs.......check with th... See more
Hi guys,
I just wanted some feedback from you. I provided an agency via e-mail with my rates in "£" in front of the figure.........and the agency agreed and sent me a project......so far so good...I start working on the project but check their email and there the figure I quoted is shown without any sterling symbol and I thought I may have forgotten to write it......double check my "sent items" and the pound "£" symbol was indeed in my e-mail.........but not in theirs.......check with them and they say they thought it was in euros (I don't know why this assumption since I am based in the UK and the agency is not in the Euro zone)....a colleague of mine whom I showed the e-mail says the agency deleted my "£" symbol but I really can not believe that..........is there any technical explanation for this.......I've been translating for 10 years and this has never happended to me....from now onwards I will write the name of the currency...ie...sterling...euros...etc......any techies who know????
Thanks. ▲ Collapse
 
Ralf Lemster
Ralf Lemster  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 14:30
English to German
+ ...
Use ISO codes Aug 22, 2007

Hi Jesús,
Special characters are sometimes garbled - this can happen with the € sign as well. When quoting, I always use the ISO code (EUR, GBP, etc.).

Best, Ralf
 
William [Bill] Gray
William [Bill] Gray  Identity Verified
Norway
Local time: 14:30
Member (2006)
English
+ ...
Thank you, Jesús Aug 22, 2007

This is a very special situation, and it's good that you have raised it. I hope it works out for you, and you get paid at your sterling rate.

Thanks to Ralf, too, and I will always follow the advice of using the ISO code in future (not that I have personally had this particular problem, fortunately!)
 
Lori Cirefice
Lori Cirefice  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 14:30
French to English
Yes Aug 22, 2007

Symbols and characters like these do sometimes get garbled or deleted. Happens to me all the time when using a particular webmail program. I usually double up the symbols/codes €EUR and £GBP and $USD just to be sure !

Hopefully the agency will make an effort in this situation and pay you the rate you had quoted.
 
Jesús Marín Mateos
Jesús Marín Mateos  Identity Verified
Local time: 13:30
English to Spanish
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Thanks guys.... Aug 22, 2007

Thanks to everyone......in this case they were not garbled but completely deleted.............thanks for your input.....
Jesús.
 
Claudia Krysztofiak
Claudia Krysztofiak  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 14:30
English to German
+ ...
Yes, that's what I always do, too Aug 22, 2007

Ralf Lemster wrote:

Special characters are sometimes garbled - this can happen with the € sign as well. When quoting, I always use the ISO code (EUR, GBP, etc.).



Every text you write is interpreted by the computer on the basis of a certain character encoding (ISO-8859-1, Unicode UTF-8 etc.). The letters A-Z, a-z, punctuation marks and the numbers 0-9 usually are interpreted the same in every character encoding. But everything else can get lost somewhere along the way. This is why you sometimes get garbled expressions for characters like ä, ö, ü and the like. So to stay on the safe side always use the ISO codes for your currency.

By the way, this phenomenon has a name: It is called Mojibake. Wikipedia has some more background info on this.

Mojibake - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake
Mojibake can also occur among same font sets. It often occurs between Windows users and Macintosh users as the font set's name are the same, however each system includes extra characters in their font set. Many people are unaware of the extra characters and use them in websites, e-mails, blogs, and so on as common characters, and as a result, mojibake occurs in same font sets.


Oh, and anyway: If there was NO currency given in your offer, then the agency should have asked you what you were talking about or should have stated explicitely what they were talking about. If it was the only character missing it is still strange ...

[Bearbeitet am 2007-08-22 08:07]
 


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Currency confusion


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