| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | Word count without articles and prepositions. A new fashion? Thread poster: Mario Cerutti
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NathalieVVT (X) 
Local time: 17:18
French to English
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| This is luducrous | Mar 18, 2005 |
Incredible! I would never want to work with a client like that.
First I would tell him that you translate sentences as a whole (idioms, expressions, etc..). What about when the target language is 20-30% more in words (e.g. English to French).
Then since you would have to count all the words manually, I would charge him the time spent. I am sure this would not be peanuts.
The word count system is there to offer what I conside a fair and practical way of maki... See more Incredible! I would never want to work with a client like that.
First I would tell him that you translate sentences as a whole (idioms, expressions, etc..). What about when the target language is 20-30% more in words (e.g. English to French).
Then since you would have to count all the words manually, I would charge him the time spent. I am sure this would not be peanuts.
The word count system is there to offer what I conside a fair and practical way of making quotes. Even (as mentionned above) if translators were to offer a quote for the whole job, how can they know exactly how long they are going to spend on the job. ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Translators or slaves? | Mar 19, 2005 |
I have been asked the same but in Spanish. And I answered them that I would deliver my translation without articles or prepositions, as I was not going to be paid for them.
It goes without saying they kept their mouths shut.
I deeply believe some people think we translators are slaves or stupid people.
Inés
| | | | | Henry, I don't want to enter a title! | Mar 20, 2005 |
MarcPrior wrote:
This is all very amusing, but translators themselves are largely to blame, by weighing their work out in words. Why blame customers for wanting to pay less? It's only natural.
The solution is to quote a fee for the whole text.
Marc
You certainly have a point when you say costs should be calculated by looking at the job as a whole. In most occasions, however, it is extremely helpful to have a common denominator, a measure to tell how much effort will be involved in the making of the translation and how much it'll cost. I don't currently know any better unit for this than the word in the source language.
| | | | | If per word invoicing is OK, why not a per word liability? | Mar 21, 2005 |
I agree with Marc; it is like the old saying, "when you point your finger blaming someone, you got three more fingers pointing back at you". We have accepted this nonsense of invoicing per word and the whole system is now exploding in our faces. We are asked to exclude numbers (who has decided that typing 1,657,398.94 is easier than typing a whole sentence?). We are asked to charge less (or not to charge at all!!) for repeated words. Now we are asked to exclude prepositions and articles. But who... See more I agree with Marc; it is like the old saying, "when you point your finger blaming someone, you got three more fingers pointing back at you". We have accepted this nonsense of invoicing per word and the whole system is now exploding in our faces. We are asked to exclude numbers (who has decided that typing 1,657,398.94 is easier than typing a whole sentence?). We are asked to charge less (or not to charge at all!!) for repeated words. Now we are asked to exclude prepositions and articles. But who has planted this ideas in our customers minds? They know next to nothing about translations but apparently they have figured out all kinds of mechanisms to pay three pennies less for our work.
The saddest part is than when a problem arises, nobody cares about per word invoicing. I am talking about professional liability and substandard translations. Elsewhere in these forums I have read threads about our customers right to refuse payment if there are quality deffects in the translation. In the same vein, we are to indemnify our customers for damages caused by our translations. I have never read anything about limiting our responsibility (or the right to refuse payment) to the sentences improperly translated. We are paid by the word, isn't it? Why should we accept any other basis to settle our responsibility or our quality mistakes?
And it was us, not the customers, who spend our time justifying these practices. So, Ines, sometimes I think we are the ones who consider that translators are slaves or... ▲ Collapse
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Wendy Cummings
United Kingdom
Local time: 17:18
Spanish to English
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| ...in on to for at of... | Apr 8, 2005 |
MarcPrior wrote:
Why blame customers for wanting to pay less? It's only natural.
Marc
Nothing wrong with that, but its when they come up with such stupid reasons for wanting to pay less.
As for prepositions, surely such little insignificant words cannot be hard to translate...the entire chapters in grammar books devoted entirely to their usage (Russian being a language whose prepositions i particularly dislike....) must surely just be wasting their time...
| | | | International Translation Agency Ltd // (X)
Local time: 18:18
English to French
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| in the case of some other languages such as Arabic it's even worse! | Apr 16, 2005 |
When we quote for an Arabic > English translation job, we always add about 15% extra charge because one graphic word in Arabic may translate into 3 words in English. Example: "I gave it to him" appears as ONE single word in Arabic because all pronouns are connected to the root-word.
You need to take into consideration the specificity of the languages you're working with.
Cheers to all
R. Titouah
EN>FR
AR>FR
Heinrich Pesch wrote:
when translating into Finnish. Als the Finnish language does not have articles and only a few preposition and postpositions. So there are always 40 percent less words in a Finnish text than in English or German. But usually we do not get paid on word count basis but on character count.
| | | | Andrew Wille (X)
Local time: 01:18
Japanese to English
| Totally Crazy | Jul 14, 2005 |
This is totally crazy. Articles and prepositions may be small but their usage can actually be incredibly complex. IMO if a non-native can understand their subtle usage then they deserve to be paid.
Translators who encourage such daft requests from customers should be strung up.
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