Select your sex?

Another revolution in the field of biology?
No, just the result of using a cheap translator.

Yesteday I got a call from a translation agency about an "urgent cross-checking job". The original translation was a questionnaire (to be conducted in Germany) from Japanese into German. (for those of you who read German, the above phrase was: "Bitte wählen Sie Ihr Geschlecht.")
Naturally it should have been "indicate your sex".

And there were literally millions of similar strange expressions.

I told the agency: this cannot have been done by a German translator. When I asked them, what kind of person did this translation (I suspected a Chinese of Indian (cheap) translator), I was told, this was done by a Japanese, who considers himself good at German and teaches German at a university!
Well done indeed.

Academic!
"Bitte wählen Sie Ihr Geschlecht." Does neither contain any misspelled words nor is the grammar wrong. The only thing that is wrong is the meaning! But that is probably something an academic is not capable of detecting. In particular since a "direct" translation of the Japanese would result in precisely the above sentence.

Well, the translation agency that assigened the job to that particular person has lost a lot of money (and possibly also a client).
The client (likely a camera maker) on the other hand, that presented said questionnaire to the general audience in Germany and got apparently lots of claims, because ordinary people could not understand the text of it, may have suffered a severe blow to its image. The damage done may have been very costly and may require some time to "heal".

Maybe ... MAYBE ... both client and translation agency do learn little lesson: DO NOT hire cheap translators for important work.
If you pay specialists peanuts for their work, you may expect to get some foul smelling s**t ... if you pardon my French.

http://nopeanuts.wordpress.com/

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Rates ... fees ...

English: title page of the catholic bible translation into German from Hieronymus Emser, an opponent of Martin Luther; published 1527 in Dresden, Saxony Español: pagina principal de la traducción católica de la biblia en alemán de Hieronymus Emser, un adversario de Martin Luther, publicado 1527 en Dresden, Saxonia (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Saint Jerome in his Study, fresco by Domenico Ghirlandaio, 1480 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I don't know about everybody else, but whereever I look, whoever I ask - it is always "lower your rates", "sell your product (=translation) cheaper", "give us your "best" = cheapest rate" .......

Well, maybe nobody has noticed, but the costs for our daily living has and is constantly INCREASING. Right now, they decided in Japan to raise taxes. One of those taxes that applies to everything -> thus making EVERYTHING more expensive.
If somebody asked me to name a product or service that has actually become cheaper over the last 10 years ..... I would have a really(!!) hard time to think of something.

The funny thing is, that the market(s) for cheap translation labor (like Proz.com) are INCREASING their fees too.

Somehow this does not match.
We (translators) as service providers are forced to constantly lower our rates, while the agencies (I am rather sure they do) and the websites all raise their prices / fees.

This will very soon lead to translators falling below the "break even" point, where they just cannot to "afford" working as translators any longer.
What remains in the translation industry? Google translate??????
I pity the customers ........

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To be a professional ... you have to pay.

Benjamin Franklin 1767 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Recently my (paid -> I got 6 month of paid membership for participating in a group buy) Proz membership has lapsed. With it (naturally?) my statue as "certified Pro" has be revoked too. That is, if you want to be a professional, you have to pay for it. Sounds like a bribe to a mafia gang to me. Well, anyway, I am back into the minors - just another no-name amateur ...
But I cannot afford to give donations to people who most likely already have a 100 times more than I do. And since there is practically 0% "return on investment", spending money to get NOTHING = is to my mind a donation.

The regular, automated mail inevitably coming from Proz at theses times reads (partially) :
"Thank you for being a member of ProZ.com. As a full member of the web's largest translator community, you are part of the network of translators that is changing the industry.
Your ProZ.com membership subscription is also a personal investment that provides powerful ways to meet new clients and expand your business, to improve your work, to network and to have fun."


Well ... I have been a Proz member for something like +12 years. This includes a total of about 20 months paid membership AND recently even a few months as a "Certified Pro". Here I checked my "peers" -> apparently I was the one and only such Pro on the entire network in the language pair Japanese-German.

BUT ... during this entire time I got exactly ONE job = worth about 36.2 Euro.
If I would have paid the membership fee all the time, I would have PAID 1,440 USD in order to get 36 USD back.
Not counting all the time (there is this very strange notion that "time is money" -> The phrase was coined by Benjamin Franklin in his Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748)) and effort invested, which did not produce any results either.

According to a personal communication I had several years ago with the founder of Proz, the membership is supposed to pay for itself very soon. Appears like wishful thinking to me.
I take the liberty of quoting:
"Japanese translators enjoy the most favorable ratio between clients and translators at ProZ.com. For 90 dollars (today it is 120 USD and scheduled to be increase on July 1) -- 10,000 yen! -- we offer preferential exposure. A single client was worth thousands of dollars to me as a translator. If I were to meet one client per year, or one client every ten years per ProZ.com, the membership would pay for itself several times over.
I am surprised that you see it differently."

Probably my calculation showing a 36 USD return on investment on 1,400 USD is wrong (I was never good at mathematics) and I am too stupid to market myself properly = so this is all my fault ...

still, I have the greatest difficulties in seeing that "membership subscription is also a personal investment that provides powerful ways to meet new clients and expand your business"


Naturally - at least in my experience - the same thing also applies to all other major "translator sites" I have tried over the past 15 years ......

Common sense not applicable to translators

Yesterday I got a mail from a coordinator I have not heard from before from a translation company for which I work more than 20 years ->
****************************************************************************
<<URGENT>> Request for translation work on U-STAR project
The localization project is a request from NICT, an Independent　Administrative Institution in Japan.　We ask you to translate common text which applies to speech translation system (U-STAR).
The target text is general, not specific, meanwhile the translations should be precise and easy-to-understand for anyone.
Wordcount: 477
Target document: Word file (doc)

Due to the budget from the clinet, we desire to define unit price for the operations below: Translation - 10 yen/w
Could you give me feedback ASAP?
****************************************************************************

It starts out with <<URGENT>> and closes with ASAP.
Yet, there is (naturally?) no mentioning of surplus fees for rush jobs.
Instead that person asks me to work for a rate which is LESS THAN HALF of the "usual rate" that very company has been paying me for over 20 years!
If I were to accept this job for this rate, it would be very hard to justify my "usual" rate for any future jobs ...

And ... this is something that keeps me always wondering ... if you go to a post office to mail a letter, that incurs a certain fee. If you ask for express delivery, that will AS A MATTER OF COURSE cost more.
If you call for a taxi in the middle of the night it will be more expensive than during the day.
If you order (a) certain product(s) AND ask for a gift wrapping or anything else "special", it goes without saying, that those extras will be billed IN ADDITION to the product price.
This is called "common sense"

How come then, that asking translators for "special delivery", "express delivery", "DTP finishing", "editing of the text" etc. IN ADDITION to the translation, seems always to be considered a "free service"???

I think, this would never happen in any other sort of business.
Apparently common sense is not applied to the work of translators ...

Offering "starvation wages (rates)" will NATURALLY put be out of business due to death by starvation. Then the company will have maybe lost an important service provider, who can give them services/products elsewhere maybe not so readily available .....

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