Konstantin Kisin United Kingdom Local time: 21:37 Member (2004) Russian to English + ...
hard to disagree with Deborah or Charlie
Mar 1, 2008
Lawyer-Linguist wrote:
It's the same in every profession. You don't see cardiologists worried about the "plight" of GPs with dwindling patient lists in rural areas, you don't see top divorce lawyers worried about the "plight" of ambulance chasing colleagues.
I made a similar observation recently in a discussion initiated by Oleg in the Russian forum. The truth is that the translation market is segmented, along lines which appear to be invisible to some. Those who understand which segment they belong to, don't concern themselves too much with what's happening in others.
Returning to the original discussion, in my view, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a lumpsum offer, indeed few would complain about an offer of 1,000,000 euros for a couple of days' work. Personally, I would much rather know that a potential client can't afford my services before wasting my time even replying to their e-mails (haven't even contemplated quoting on a posted job in a long time).
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(haven't even contemplated quoting on a posted job in a long time).
because you are on the phone all the time...
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Samuel Murray Netherlands Local time: 22:37 Member (2006) English to Afrikaans + ...
Translation isn't a pair of jeans
Mar 1, 2008
Ivana Micheli wrote:
... that would be the same as a shopper going into a shop and saying "I'll pay you £10 for this pair of jeans (rather than the £50 they usually retail at) because this is what the jeans are worth to me". ... Granted, translation is a service rather than a product as such but the principle is the same.
The fact that translation is a service and a pair of jeans is a product is not the only difference. A pair of jeans is a personal purchase. A translation is a business purchase. Apart from artistic and literary translation, translation is a business service. You cannot compare buying a translation with personal shopping.
In business, a client wants to create an end-product which he will sell to users or buyers. He will have calculated his costs and budgeted certain amounts of money for certain parts of the creation of his product. No business can operate on an open-ended budget, i.e. "we'll just have to pay what these translators ask".
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Samuel Murray Netherlands Local time: 22:37 Member (2006) English to Afrikaans + ...
The real problem
Mar 1, 2008
Giovanni Guarnieri MITI, MIL wrote:
Edit: @ Samuel - the lump sum offered in this specific job from a British agency equals to about 0,036 eur/word, gross.
Okay, but then surely the problem is not the concept of the lump sum offer itself, but specifically the *low* lump sum offers. And I don't see a difference between low lump sum offers and low per-word offers. They are both low, and they are both valid topics for complaint.
But it seems strange that the OP wants to weed out low offers by denying lump sums, regardless of whether they are high lump sums or low lump sums. That's like saying "most second-hand car salesmen are crooks, therefore lets ban second-hand car sales so as to reduce the number of crooks".
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Oleg Rudavin Ukraine Local time: 23:37 Member (2003) English to Ukrainian + ...
To elaborate on Samuel's
Mar 1, 2008
Samuel Murray wrote: The fact that translation is a service and a pair of jeans is a product is not the only difference. A pair of jeans is a personal purchase. A translation is a business purchase. Apart from artistic and literary translation, translation is a business service.
In business, a client wants to create an end-product which he will sell to users or buyers. He will have calculated his costs and budgeted certain amounts of money for certain parts of the creation of his product. No business can operate on an open-ended budget, i.e. "we'll just have to pay what these translators ask".
Untill recently, a commodity or service was mostly sold in the local market - geographically limited market.
Globalization, acceccibility of banking and payment instruments, search for new markets brought significant changes to the industries: presently, most commodities or services are sell worldwide.
How important is translation for the sales figures?
It is critical!
Because:
- if there's no translation, potential buyers can't really learn that the commodity or service exists
- if the translation is poor it will have negative rather than positive effect on the sales scaring potential buyers off instead of attracting them.
I wish all clients understood it!
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ViktoriaG Canada Local time: 16:37 Member (2005) English to French + ...
Golden words
Mar 1, 2008
Oleg Rudavin wrote:
How important is translation for the sales figures?
It is critical!
Because:
- if there's no translation, potential buyers can't really learn that the commodity or service exists
- if the translation is poor it will have negative rather than positive effect on the sales scaring potential buyers off instead of attracting them.
I wish all clients understood it!
I just hope those who should are reading this...
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Jeff Whittaker United States Local time: 16:37 Member (2002) Spanish to English + ...
Quality
Mar 1, 2008
Samuel Murray wrote:
The client can't accomplish *more* with an excellently outstanding translation than he can accomplish with a merely satisfactory translation.
I'm afraid I will have to disagree with you on that statement. You obviously have never had a team of attorneys pour over every single word of your translation with a fine-tooth comb. In legal translations every word and every nuance is important. In some translation markets, quality is actually more important than price and a satisfactory translation is useless.
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ntext United States Local time: 15:37 German to English + ...
Translation vs. Soy Beans
Mar 1, 2008
Samuel Murray wrote:
The translator's experience is relevant, but only to determine whether the translator is likely to produce an adequate translation. The translator's experience is not relevant to determining price, though (at least not to the client).
A translator may feel that he must be paid more because he is more qualified, but this matters little to the client. The client can't accomplish *more* with an excellently outstanding translation than he can accomplish with a merely satisfactory translation.
A translation is not a work of art that fetches a price based on how good it is -- no, a translation is a commodity that has a certain commercial value for the client.
That sounds very, very wrong to me.
Consider two translation jobs A and B. Assume the source texts are equally long and equally complex. But Job A requires a high-quality translation (perhaps because it's meant to be published in a glossy image brochure) and Job B requires only a so-so translation that conveys the gist.
Is it not common sense to expect that Job A would cost more than Job B? And is it, by extension, not plausible that a translator who delivers A-level quality would ask a higher rate than the one who delivers B-level quality?
True, there's no point for a buyer to pay more for high quality when all he needs is mediocre quality. But mediocre quality is not always good enough, and higher quality (statistically, on average) comes with a higher price.
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Lawyer-Linguist Portugal Local time: 21:37 Member (2004) Dutch to English
Hear, hear
Mar 1, 2008
Jeff Whittaker wrote:
In legal translations every word and every nuance is important. In some translation markets, quality is actually more important than price and a satisfactory translation is useless.
[Edited at 2008-03-02 13:55]
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Samuel Murray Netherlands Local time: 22:37 Member (2006) English to Afrikaans + ...
"Satisfactory" is not a euphemism
Mar 2, 2008
Jeff Whittaker wrote:
In some translation markets, quality is actually more important than price and a satisfactory translation is useless.
Erm... I don't mean the term "satisfactory" as a euphemism for "poorly". A translation that is satisfactory can't be useless (unless the client renders it useless through misuse). If it was useless to begin with, then how could it ever have been satisfactory?
Surely there is a minimum standard to which a translation must be done, and for different markets that minimum will be different. A gister's minimum is much lower than a lawyer's, but in both cases anything below that minimum is not stasifactory.
Norbert Gunther Kramer wrote:
Is it not common sense to expect that Job A would cost more than Job B? And is it, by extension, not plausible that a translator who delivers A-level quality would ask a higher rate than the one who delivers B-level quality?
Absolutely. A more complex product/service will usually cost more than a simple product/service.
But if a client wants a simple product, would it wrong of him to expect to pay the price of a simple product, regardless of whether the producer of the product is capable of producing a complex product for the same purpose?
But mediocre quality is not always good enough, and higher quality (statistically, on average) comes with a higher price.
I agree completely. If mediocre quality is not good enough for the client's purpose, it would silly of him to purchase mediocre quality anyway.
Here's a question -- whose fault is it if the mediocre translation isn't good enough? Surely the translator is partly at fault, for he is the one who decides to produce a translation with a level of mediocrity below that which the client requires. Of course the client is often also at fault for failing to clearly or comprehensively specify the level of mediocrity required.
The translators' fail-safe method of avoiding this situation is to always produce a high quality translation -- so that the quality will always be well above the required threshold. But this is an expensive fail-safe from the client's point of view, because he has to pay a higher price, simply to compensate for the translators' inability to guage the required level of mediocrity.
[Edited at 2008-03-02 07:48]
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Steven Capsuto United States Local time: 16:37 Member (2004) Spanish to English + ...
If you don't like the pricing, ignore the job posting
Mar 2, 2008
Viktoria Gimbe wrote:
Those who are new to this business will think that that is what their work is worth AND they will end up thinking that it is up to the outsourcer to dictate the rate, whereas those of us who have more experience know that this is far from being the case - and are doing our best to keep it that way, which is becoming increasingly difficult.
Yes, we set our rates, just as car dealers set automobile prices. But you can certainly walk into a car dealership and say "This is how much I can afford to spend. Do you have anything in my range?" The worst the dealer will say is "no."
I don't mind lumpsum postings as long as they include a word count. If the most specific they get is a page count, that's meaningless to me and I won't bid.
[Edited at 2008-03-02 17:46]
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