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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"Speed translation"

This came in the other day on 23:30 Japan time. The company is located in New York and I would have to check the time difference:

"I have a potentially crazy question to ask you...would you be able to turn around 2 Japanese patent applications, one of 4597 words and the other of 2255 words, by 7:45AM tomorrow?  More feasibly, would you be able to turn around at least the larger patent application by 7:45AM tomorrow?"

My first response:
Good morning (3 am!) from Japan
Thank you for your job offer, but ...
with all due respect - the requested due date is very unrealistic!

Having a short look showed approximately 23 + 12 pages of translation.
Together that would be 35 pages of PATENT SPECIFICATION, which is a lot more difficult than ordinary text.
In a few hours???
Maybe even asking for a discount rate?

I am not capable of working that fast (being busy with other work anyway).
I would like to meet the person who actually CAN do that.
Even if somebody says s/he CAN produce that much patent translation in such a short time ... I would not trust that person/translation.
Please ask ANYBODY working in ANY patent office about the feasibility, and more importantly the trustworthiness of the produced translation.

Sorry, but I cannot help you, even if I wanted to.
And my professional pride demands that I DO NOT accept work, when I cannot take responsibility for the results.

When the other party agreed, I added a little metaphor:
No problem and no harm done.
It is simply amazing how little the people who are asking for this kind of work actually KNOW about what is involved in translation -- or else CARE about it.

To put it in a little (distorted, sorry) perspective:
Let's say someone asks a construction firm to something like the Empire State Building - in two weeks with a budget of 8.75 USD.
I can see the exhilarated president of the construction company ...
And naturally everybody would agree that this absolutely normal ....

*************************
One of my grandfather's favorite sayings was“Use the right tool for the job”
―common-sense advice that applies to a wide range of situations.
Unfortunately, as Mark Twain observed, common sense isn't very common!

Trials ... again, stuborn shortsightedness

Japanese language (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yesterday I received a response to a mail I sent to company with which I had contact several years ago, trying to refresh the memory of me. I copy the correspondence, not giving any names. To my mind the other party (company located in India) is asking rather unreasonable things.
Or is it me, who is off the mark???????

My mail specified what I am doing:
Japanese -> German
Japanese -> English
English <-> German translations.
medicine / pharmaceutics / chemistry / science / engineering
patents / manuals / etc.

Upon which I got the response:
Thanks for your mail,we would like to see your translation quality,is it possible for you to do 2 page sample from Japanese to English ?

Me again ->
Trial: I have done that so many times over the past three decades, that I got sick of it.
As a result I picked up some "trials" in various language pairs, fields
and put them on my website:
http://www.einklang.com/Translation%20samples.htm
Please have a look there. I am convinced you will find more than enough material there to judge my capabilities. (naturally, all translations are made by me)

I do understand but as per our company policy we have to evaluate the new translator by giving our sample. Let me know if you are interested or not ?
We request you to deliver it tomorrow EOD. 

Thank you, but ...
this text has 1149 characters, which represents approximately 3.2 pages of translation.
I do not do "trials" of this size any more.
AND, this is about business (financial orientation). That is a subject matter I usually do not handle.
In my original mail I indicated roughly, what I am usually working with.


Fine or else do the first 2 pages if you don't wish to do sample we regret to say that we can't add you in our database


Any proper translator is a specialist in some fields but not in others.
If an employer assigns work lying outside the translator's
specialization, it cannot expect proper results.
A barber does not do carpenter work.
Since you are apparently unwilling to recognize this universal truth,
I believe it is indeed safer for me not to be a part of your team.

Sorry for stealing your time.
Thomas Blasejewicz

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google translate

I have heard about "google translate" before, but never used it before. Recently an acupuncture colleague sent me an English text, which he "put through google translate" and wanted me to have a look and if necessary iron out mistakes.

Well, what I received is frankly unintelligible! I have to translate the whole thing myself from scratch.

To check, I copied a 2-line Japanese text into the translation field and selected (a) German and (b) English as the target language.
The results are shown below.

Neither can be understood, unless you KNOW the Japanese meaning or else someone provides extensive explanations.
This proves, that "machine translation" will for some time NOT become any sort of thread to the service I provide.

Source text:
お世話になっております。
度々申し訳ないのですが、再度確認をお願い出来ますでしょうか。

Translations:
Wir verdanken.
Von Zeit zu Zeit tut mir leid, was kann ich den Scheck wieder.

We indebted.
From time to time I'm sorry, what can I have the check again.

certified PRO status

Good evening from Japan
A while ago I obtained the "certified pro" status of Proz.com for the language pair Japanese-German.
I do not really know how this thing works, but today I was playing around with my profile and all the funny links found there. One said, "show me my peer PRO".
Clicking on that link is supposed to show me "ALL" other people working in the same language pair, who are also certified PROs.

Well, it seems I am the one and only of my kind on that network.
That makes me feel both lonely AND proud:

I am the one and only professional in this pair.
WOW!
If that were true, it would be really amazing! (It isn't, of course)

Yet, I would not complain, if this outstanding position would bring in some work .....

Transperfect - the rich giant -

Image via Wikipedia

I get in more or less regular intervals "job offers" form the translation giant Transperfect.
However, in the past I had mostly BAD experiences with this company and these experiences also showed, that it does not pay (literally!) to work for Transperfect. The current exchange rate also greatly contributes to this situation.
Transperfect apparently also a bad reputation as a non-payer.
Yet, the responses from the project managers force me to believe, that I am either dealing with DO NOT care (at all) about the people they are dealing with, or else are so rich, that they run this company purely for fun.

Below a few quotes from communications with PMs

Transperfect: (2012/02/24 8:50)
We have a new *English**into **German *Translation and Proofreading job we need your help with!

My response:
My experiences have shown that it does not pay (literally!) to work for Transperfect. But I have to survive too and therefore cannot afford to work for peanuts.

Transperfect: (2012/02/24 10:13)
> Would you be able to do the Proofreading for $25?  It should only take about an hour to do. 

My response:
Well, you should know that the funny payment practices of Transperfect inevitably lead to a situation where I have to PAY the bank -
one way or other - about 30 USD or more in bank fees to get your 25 USD!
I prefer to do work that actually pays ...

Transperfect:
We have a new English into German Translation job we need your help with!
This will be a flatrate of $10 to do this super small job!

My response:
NO thank you.
I believe I explained this before.
10 USD: the bank fees to get this would be about 30 USD!
Even if I would ask for PayPal (which does not give me any money at all; only some virtual nonsense that I can ONLY use to buy useless things on ebay), YOUR COMPANY applies a fine (they call it handling fee) of 10 USD for this "extraordinary difficult" transaction.

Funny, for everybody else on the planet that usually works fine and is free.

So, again and again, you ask me to work for free.
Having a family, I cannot afford to do that.
And I would like to believe that you couldn't afford it either.
Or do I have to assume, that I am dealing with people (Transperfect) that are so rich, they do not need to work at all and are engaged in these activities purely as a pasttime??????

Transperfect:
Sorry about that.  Will keep that in mind


Transperfect: 2/29 (= next day!) 12:07
We have a new Egnlish into German Translation job we need your help with!
Stats are  78 new, 16 fuzzy, and 3 gold words.
DEADLINE: Translation 12pm EST  2/29 Wednesday. This will be a flatrate of $10

Just yesterday this very person said: "Sorry about that.  Will keep that in mind."

Maybe there is not enough mind to hold this information ...

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