Perfect ...

On one of the many translator sites at which I am registered a job offer was posted.
It said there:

"We need someone who will translate, proofread, and edit all of your work into ... or from ... into English. Everything must be perfect every time. If you can provide a favorable rate, we can try to give a high volume of work."

This came from an American company.
Don't they say in ENGLISH (!): "Nobody is perfect"  ???
And, naturally, the "favorable rate" most likely means "peanuts" ...

So, who of the superhuman translator heroes out there wants to work for peanuts?
Please raise your hands.

Rate? --- No problem!

Patent drawing of flight simulator by Rougerie (France - 1928) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Japanese Language Book (Photo credit: born1945)

The other day I was asked, whether I can translate FOUR related patent specifications, 2 from Japanese and 2 from English, into German. The Italian company (CAESAR SRL) wrote in its mail:
"We evaluated this job as:
- 5055 words from English / - 4000 words from Japanese
approx. qty: 9055 words / fixed price: € 780,00 --> 0.086 Euro/Word"

0.08 Euro/word for a patent specification from Japanese to German???

A few days after I reclined the offer, I got a mail from "wagner-international", asking me, whether I can do PRECISELY the same job (J-G portion only).
That made me celebrate. WONDERFUL!!!
Apparently nobody else is working for so low rates (for material of this complexity). And I told Wagner so.

That company says of itself: "We specialize in cost–effective, expert communication and media solutions ..."
Meaning: we squeeze every last drop of sweat and tear out of the translator to provide clients with CHEAP (the magic word of our time) product.
If it kills a few (thousand) translators ... well, that is their problem.

On the other hand ...
I got an inquiry --- by telephone! --- about a patent translation from France.
Once I had a look at the text, got a better readable PDF file here in Japan and told them my rate (the due date was fixed up front), the person at the other end of the line said: Rate? -- No problem!
That was not a translation agency, it was a patent office:
International Patent-Translation Bureau (IPTB)

On the one hand you have the agencies (sounds like "agent" from the movie "Matrix") that try to cheat and possibly kill translators,
and on the other hand you have companies knowing that some things simply have their price.

Opting for "cheapest is best" will run people/companies into trouble sooner or later. I have seen it many times ... those companies for which I was too expensive receive claims from their customers and then ask me (or anybody else) to have a look at the tranlation and "brush it up a little" ...

Oh, how stupid!

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• I Work Hard for the Money So You'd Better Treat Me Right!

Unbelievable!

This morning I got (again) one of those wonderful (Chinese in this case) mails:
> We have one file to be translated from Japanese to english, one
> part is around 7000 japanese characters, second part is around
> 10,000 japanese characters.    It is text about law, can you
> please take one part of it?  Our deadline is 17:00 on Feb 3 at
> Tokyo time.  Price is 0.04 USD per english word. Our payment term
> is paypal or moneybookers.

Which was just followed by the name of sender.
(Admittedly, searching through the footer of the mail allowed me to find that person's Proz.com profile.)

The above numbers (7000 characters, quite complex material) indicate about 20 pages of translation and deadline would be about 24 hours later. (Not to mention that PayPal would swallow about half of the earned in form of "fees")

Personally I consider (and told the sender) a mail with no identification of who the sender is, what company s/he works for or any contact information as shady.VERY shady!

And the rate: 0.04 USD/word is a joke, isn't it?
Given the current exchange rate, this EXTREMELY low.
On that rate I could not make enough money to "put food on the table" = LITERALLY, even if I were to work 36 hours a day.

I told the sender (actually located in Hongkong) so, whereupon he replied:

"The file is attached and our info is as blow, please let me know whether you can translate the yellow part of the file."

I don't know about everybody else, but apart from irrealistically too cheap I consider this an offense. An attempt to make a fool out of a translation WORKER.

Are the Chinese not supposed to take particular care of the WORKER COMRADES???