Unreasonable

This happens on a more or less regular basis:
I applied to a job posted on various different translator sites. Partial job description:
"We’re now looking for Japanese to English translators to work in a project about factory automation. The volume is about 250K chars. .. To know more about the subject, please refer to the sample text below."
Requirements from the poster included to work ONLY during the daytime, approximately 6 hours. I wrote, I can do that and gave them my usual rate.

Two days later, I get the following message (partial):
"This project contains 3 parts—Factory Automation, Factory Supplies and Electronics—and has 3,000,000 chars. The first part, Factory Automation, has technical terms stored in TM. You can also refer to the English websites we provide. So it should be quite simple to translate this part. For Factory Supplies and Electronics, there are Japanese websites for you to check the context. We need to deliver 60K chars to our client everyday. Therefore, you’re free to take as many chars as you like (max. 60K) daily.
In view of this, could you possibly lower your rate to at least USD$ 0.04 per Japanese char? The other candidates have a more competitive rate as USD$0.03 per char."

Well, just for the fun of it, I replied as follows:
Good evening from Japan
And thank you for your message, but I was already wondering when this would happen.
This = "lower your rate".
On 2/24 you wrote in your mail: "However, we will pay you according to your rate, if the translation is approved." (HAS it been "approved"?)
which came as a pleasant surprise to me. Now, things turn out the "usual" way.
Believe me, I have seen / experienced this kind of work before and therefore speak from (30 years of) experience!

Usual = unreasonable requests for unreasonably low rates.
I take the liberty of assuming, that this is what the (Japanese?) client requires, so that you are not guilty of anything.
Maybe people can survive in China or Taiwan working for 0.03 USD/char., but that is NOT realistic here in Japan.
"So it should be quite simple to translate this part. ... there are Japanese websites for you to check the context."
THAT is precisely what makes this work VERY labor intensive.
* no context to refer to
* highly technical terms (I VERY much doubt that terms like "高周波焼入れ / 浸炭焼き" are FA related!) that needs to be checked
* "websites to check ..." means, you have to search through many pages of online material = requires time! (unless they have well organized glossaries -> unlikely)
 Let's take for example "高周波焼入" -> if you KNOW the translation already -> just the time for entering it into the software;
if you need to look up something / everything or even check "reference" material -> let's assume quick, smooth work to do all that in TWO minutes.
Then it would take 24 seconds per character (this number may of course vary widely).
Then: 24 x 60,000=1,440,000 seconds= 400 hours of work daily.
no eating, sleeping, telephone calls, toilet breaks ... nothing.
Since you require translators who work ONLY during the daytime, let's say 8 hours without once removing their fingers from the keyboard = 50 translators.
(the sample you gave me as a trial contained practically 0 repetitions -> the use of CAT tools is unlikely to help!)
To make it happen in reality, you would need more.
Getting THAT many translators, who all work for peanuts can happen only in China or India.

Naturally, the quality (for reasons I outlined before) cannot be quaranteed or even maintained among that many translators.
The client could put the whole thing through Google translate and get the same result: incomprehensible mumble jumble.
So, if the client INSISTS on a cheap product, cheap Chinese quality is what it will get.

I may not be the best in the field, BUT as a professional translator I prefer to TAKE PRIDE in my work.
As such, I can not live with the idea that it is completely irrelevant, whether my translation is correct or not,
as long as I put ANYTHING into the empty cells of the Excel sheet.

If your "other candidates" have no problem with working for 0.03 USD and no doubts about the nature of this work ... fine.
Please rely on those gentlepersons.
Under the given conditions I prefer not volunteer for more material than I could do comfortably during an afteroon tea break.

Thank you.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
The chief virtue that language can have is clearness,
and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.
Hippocrates

"Fuzzy matches" - make me feel fuzzy all over ...

When talking about CAT tools, the term "fuzzy matches" keeps popping up. In theory I understand what that is supposed to mean, but .....
this always comes with "strings attached", if I may say so.

First, when Japanese companies send me work, even translation of manuals etc., the companies already "check" for those portions that are identical or almost identical and deal with those. I get ONLY what is different. That means, I don't get any chance to encounter any fuzzy matches.
Second, even if the CAT tool DOES present me fuzzy matches, I will have to CAREFULLY compare the presented versions and edit as required, in front, at the end, in between, changing word order etc ...
Usually, I would finish my job a lot easier and quicker, when I type it entirely new then doing all the "editing". I have not yet bothered actually COUNTING the key strokes that would be required for such editing and compared that to typing, but I suspect the count may actually be higher ... at least that is my impression.

So, if editing "fuzzy matches" actually requires the same amount of effort (and time) as typing a new translation, I fail to see why the work invested into fuzzy matches should be cheaper. Or am I missing something important?

Well, I mentioned it before, with ONE SINGLE exception, so far all attempts at using the CAT tool "memoQ through one year have made my work (and my life!) MORE difficult ...

CAT tools - are they really helpful???

Last spring I bought one CAT tool (memoQ) and although I it tried many times already on different files, so far it has proven "helpful" in just ONE case. Everything else has been trouble!
Most probably this is because I am just too stupid, but I suspect some more "basic" reasons too.

For example:
I get a Word file for partial translation = meaning the file contains German, English and Japanese text, of which only the Japanese portions scattered throughout the document need to be translated.
1) I have to import the file.
2) Select all German/English text portions and copy them into the target segement.
3) Translate a few segments, want to take a break or continue working somewhere else.
4) Attempt BACKUP the "project".
=> Get error messages that tell me, I cannot do that. The reasons elude me.
*  In fall of last year someone took remote control of my computer to resolve similar problems with an Excel file, and commented: "Oh, that is a "known issue" = bug. I will try to make the developers fix this."
5) Attempt to "export" the active document, which still contains a few hundred untranslated segments, fails too. Error message:
"At least one of the documents you are trying to export contains errors than prevent memoQ from exporting the document.
Do you wish to resolve these errors now?" Yes ->
6) Results, naturally, a very long list of items/segments, where the "error" is:
"Too few memoQ {tags} in target segment"
This is a matter of course too, since I have yet done anything with those segments!

The customer support tells me:
"It is not possible to simply ignore all the tag errors in memoQ, and export a monolingual document in it's original format, as the missing tags would make that impossible."
7) "Export bilingual" sort of "works" = it gives me a 2-column, intricately interlaced and completely garbled rtf file in which I would have to search and than manually copy each and every already translated segment to the orginal Word file. (Since memoQ cannot handle ODF files, I am also stuck with Word.)

Well, THAT does not make ANY sense. In that case I would be a lot better off using the original file from the beginning and forget about memoQ altogether.
Actually, that was the idea when I tried to "export" the document.

So, with the mentioned ONE SINGLE exception I ALWAYS get the some (or all) of the following problems
* Software cannot import original file
* Software cannot export imported file
* Software cannot "backup" the project
* In order to work on the designated text, I have to work on ALL OTHER text too.* The work put into a file only half finished apparently cannot be recovered be recovered in any sensible/practical way.
* I always MANUALLY have to tell memoQ, that it should ignore various things I would NEVER have to care about working with an ordinary (Word/text) file. There I would for example just a date/number and that's it. In memoQ I am confronted with the need to check "number format", verify numbers, insert tags etc. etc.
What in a word processor is for example TWO keystrokes (for example "10") may well need to required 10 or more "clicks" to get the same thing done!
That is FIVE TIMES MORE work!

This kind of software is supposed to "increase productivity" and make the process of translation easier and more efficient. THAT is not my experience. It makes the translation work more difficult, time-consuming and labor intensive and thus DEFINITELY REDUCES productivity.

Maybe you need very special documents to begin with?
For example during translation of a Japanese patent (in particular the claims) the order in which the individual portions of the sentence are arranged in Japanese differs significantly from for example English or German. So, the "alignment" of segments like "A-A", "B-B", "C-C" etc. does not work. It needs to be "A-C", "B-B", "A-C" or something like that.
I could not yet find out, if the (any) CAT tool would be able to handle that in any labor-easing form ...

But, as I already said, I am probably must too stupid.