Low rates even in Germany ...

Yesterday or so I received via one of the many translator sites an "job offer" from Germany.
It is about (urgent) translation work in the English-German language pair.
The company offers 0.04 Euro per Word.
(The company itself "naturally" makes a mistake, noting the rate as 0.04 cents - which would be approximately 0.0004 USD!)
It does not specify, whether these source or target words.

Maybe it is only me, but I dare doubt, that people living in Europe can make a "living" on those rates.
The 0.0004 USD/word rate totally out of the question.

It always seems to me, that the internet serves due to its lack of adjustments and regulations to match different conditions as a sort of parasite, eating away the basis for sound living.

Translators - resist

Trump (I believe that person does not deserve any honorific or title), a self-declared enemy of freedom, is "all over the place", intentionally driving the world into chaos and towards destruction. Eventually his arrogant and self-centered behavior = he "trumples"over everthing and everybody, will adversely affect everybody who is not a fat, rich, white man living in the States.
And there is probably not much a few translators can do about it.

But ...
since it is now "America first", maybe the translator's community can come together and boycott jobs coming from the USA and/or American companies, so that those companies that a currently heavily "outsourcing" much of their work to those "dirty foreign people" who should be slaves in the first place, will have to rely more on "American only" resources. Requiring them to pay their "personnel" rates compatible with survival in the States and not the "peanuts" they offer on their slave markets.
I wrote about those before: e.g., Wagner Consulting International which offers 0.03 USD/word, which is WAY below any international standard and even cheaper than India based companies or TransPerfect. I would not be surprised, if Trump has his fingers in those businesses too.
I VERY MUCH doubt, that an ordinary American translator would/could work for 0.03 USD.

So ... what would happen, if Trump has to rely on translations = which ARE indispensible in numerous industries ONLY on those that are made IN America by white (male) translators? After all, if a translator from any arabic country would translate something, s/he might be planning/coordinating a terror attack his bombastity Trump.
Manpower will not meet the demand, quality might suffer when people are forced to work on unfamiliar materials, prices will soar because salaries/rates in the USA are most likely MUCH higher than what is paid to "ordinary" translators.

This *** might *** give Trump a hint. But then again, since he is pathologically delusional, he would/could not acknowledge that snow is white, even if he were left in the middle of an ice field in the antarctic.

"Translator resistance" -  a stupid idea of mine. I am well aware, that many translator simply cannot afford to recline work. I am one of those myself!!! But, this could be the minimal contribution translators might be able to make to the just started battle for freedom.
I myself will commit to this cause to the best of my abilities.
I would be "outrageously happy" (to speak with Linus), if anybody would actually feel it worthwhile to join me.
Thank you.
 

Wagner Consulting International

"Wagner Consulting International.
Location: New York C.
I hope this finds you well. I’ve got an EN-DE project around 700 words, which needs to be done by 4PM CET today. Budget will be 25 USD.
Junior Project Manager"

Well, that is 0.035 USD/word - while it is not clear whether this means source or target words.
Presume you use a 200 word/page format, that is then 7 USD per page.

I don't know about everybody else, but to me (and I believe a large portion of the western world) this is PEANUTS.
Also I take the liberty of doubting, that anybody with a family living in New York could survive working for this slave rate.

As a company - Wagner International - should be ashamed of itself asking people to work for this rate!

Fair trial

As a translator one either contacts new companies or else IS ASKED by new companies to work for them. In either case the translator is likely to be asked to do a trial/test free of charge. Over more than 30 years I have been asked a million times to do these trials and actually did many. Recently, however, I am getting very tired of those. Why?
Well ... you do those tests = spend maybe hours to do work FOR FREE, have to wait a sometimes unbeliebable long time for the results, and when they finally tell you, you have passed the test, the company discloses "their rates". It then turns out, those are unacceptably low. If I knew in advance those rates ... I would not have done the test.
I now ask companies up front to disclose their rates, since there is really no point in working for free, only to conclude later, that working for the particular company is "out of the question".
To be a FAIR trial, I believe the companies should disclose their rates up front!

Ever wondered why???

I got this via one of the many translator sites I am registered at:

"Hi,
We need German to Japanese translators urgently.
Pls send your resume to anithagomathy@gmail.com ASAP.
From: anitha gomathy / India / Company: Aabheri Transco"

I did contact the lady and said, I do Japanese-German translations (the post said: German<->Japanese).
She sent me the file to have a look at and wrote:

"Please let me know if you are available for the attached job.
Language Pair: DE<>Japanese
Please deliver the project by Tuesday morning (THAT would be the following day!) 11 AM IST (24-03-2014).
Payment: 140 USD total in 25 days via PayPal"

File size: 4964 words. = 0.028/word
appr. 31 pages worth of translation, to be done in (less than) one day.
The file shows, that CAT tools will NOT be of much help.
I use "160 words/page" as a rough yardstick for technical translations.
Such a page would be 3.2 USD.

OK. Everybody who wishes to work through the night in super high speed for 3 USD per page raise your hands.
No one? Funny.
Actually, this lady posted - and keeps on posting; she seems to be getting desparate -
this job on just about ALL translator sites I know of,
but apparently nowhere anybody has responded (the counter always says "0 bids").

Strange, isn't it?
I wonder whether that Indian lady ever wonders why nobody is offering her any help ...

Translation rate down

(somewhat similar to "Black Hawk down" ...)
Maybe I just "don't get it"  ... all around me, on a daily basis, prices are going up. For just about everything. The other day I went to get a hair cut. AFTER I was done, the shop keeper said: "Prices have gone up. This will now be xxx." where the xxx represents a price 25% higher than in the past. All I (and every other customer) can do is silently nod and pay the new price. That's possibly not exactly life, but it certainly is business.

At about the same time, I got a small job from a translation company for which I have been working for at least 15 years. AFTER the job was done and delivered, the coordinator sent me a mail, saying that this is a "normal" translation (as opposed to the technical materials I usually work with) and the company will therefore pay 30% less than usual.
There was nothing easier than usual about this work AND nobody told me in advance of this "change in payment policy", so I did bill them the usual rate.

However, this is just one of the many examples of those "Black Hawk Down" scenarios, where translation agencies and/or customers unilaterally cut translation rates, sending the translator spiraling into the dust to die.
I ***DO NOT*** understand the rationale behind these price cuts. Even if manufacturers may be able to "make" computers for example cheaper due to improved manufacturing methods, the time and work involved in half-way acceptable translation does not change much or at all. The use of those strange CAT tools has for the work I get, NEVER been proven helpful.

Or is every younger person working with translations is at least 10 times more efficient than I am ... and in addition has no family to support and thus can afford to work for peanuts?????

"Big job frenzy" -> Update

The "Big job frenzy" continues! On and on and on and ...
By now everybody is not only in a frenzy, but also desperate.

Every day I am getting messages from all over the world, ALL translator
sites list an unending stream of "job offers" pertaining to this thing,
AND ... everybody is offering peanuts as payment.
Since most of those people are NOT going to meet the deadline, by now everybody is getting desperate and I get phone calls almost everyday also from all over the world.
Again offering peanuts at first, but when I say no, the offer switches to "we pay you whatever you want".
Now, THAT is very fishy!

One of the first messages came from the giant slave market "Transperfect". During one of the many phone calls I received from TP, the person on the other end said: "TransPerfect is the ONLY allowed/authorized to work on this project".
If that is/were true, how come I am getting millions of messages from all sort of companies? Only one of those company mentioned, that is is a "member of the TransPerfect family" (sounds like "mafia").

Most of the companies located in India, China, Arab countries, South America etc. started by offering 0.03 USD/word. Now that they find themselves in trouble meeting the deadline(s), the offer suddenly jumps by 100% to 0.06 USD/word, which is still only 50% of a half-way decent offer for orthodox language combinations like English/German, French/English etc.
The "whatever you want" thing happened through a conversation over the phone. A call from a company in Egypt. They first offered 0.07 USD. I said no. Next offer was 0.08 USD. But when I still said no, the person offered: "we pay you whatever you want".

Maybe I not getting this right, but somebody (everybody?) seems to be not telling the truth. If they are not explicitly "lying, they still apparently are trying to coax translators in doing their work for peanuts and withholding "what is right" as a last resort measure.

I don't know about everybody else, but I have the greatest problems recognizing this as "honest work". To me it looks much more like an attempt at deceiving / cheating the translators ...

frenzy,MILLION,job,rate,RUSH,slave,peanuts,deceiving,cheating,deadline,desperate

"Big job" frenzy

Probably EVERYBODY got this:
"...translating approximately 30 MILLION words of Japanese into ENGLISH for an important business matter." (since this is Jap-Eng, the proper expression would be CHARACTERS and not words!)

I got the same message from a whole series of translation agencies, some of which mention a deadline, others don't. Those that do, say something like "until the end of the month = 2-3 weeks.

Well, 30 million Japanese characters correspond to approximately 75,000 (Japanese standard pages, or 5000 pages a day. That definitely IS a big job. No wonder that one single agency cannot handle this volume and everybody, with reference to the expression "feeding frenzy", is joining into this "big job frenzy".

Naturally (??!??), everybody is asking for the so-called "best rates", which are specified by some of those frenzied companies as 0.02-0.03 USD/target word. The other companies apparenty wait for translators to voluntarily OFFER to work for peanuts. Forget for a moment, that I live in Japan, even in Europe for a common language pair like German-English, a "normal/acceptable" rate is somewhere around 0.10 USD. For a more exotic language combination like Japanese-English, rates SHOULD be higher. In particular for RUSH jobs.

One of the agencies was careless enough to mention that the material is "financial documentation" from Nomura Securities International, Inc.
Isn't that nice.
THAT corporate giant loves to steal (naturally they call it differently!) billions of dollars each year from its clients.
Another company mentioned merge between other very big (=rich) companies (I forgot the names now).
Other people mentioned the "merger of two big corporations" (also very rich companies, but I forgot the names)
Do they really NEED to be so greedy as to employ thousands of slaves that are paid in peanuts? Probably the majority of the translators working on this "job" are neither native speakers (the client officially accepts this!) nor really experts.
I think it is rather obvious, in what kind of documentation this will result ...

Some of the translator sites, where these offers are posted, also show the number of bid the poster received. If THAT is any indication of the real situation ... then they will never make it!

I would really like to have this thing past. The FLOOD of offers/questions/requests of emails swamping my mailbox is really annoying (to put it mildly).

*************************
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!

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

Me and you - thats different.

Today a "job offer" was posted on multiple sites:

"This is the first project on a long list of documents to be translated.
It has two parts, 18,000 words in each.
We will accept a flat rate of no more than 400 USD for each part, no more than 800 USD for the entire project.
(-> 400 / 18000 = 0.022 USD/word ; this is my calculation)

Requirements:
1. Must be a native German speaker with excellent writing skills
2. Must be near-native fluent in English and have experience translating philosophical, spiritual, and religious documents.

Please contact me only if you're serious about the job ... Payment will be made through paypal immediately upon delivery.

(From the poster's (Qiangwei Wang) profile:)
Preferred currency: USD
Min. rate        per word    per hour       
Chinese > English    0.12 USD    45.00 USD
English > Chinese    0.10 USD    40.00 USD
German > Chinese    0.15 USD    50.00 USD
German > English    0.15 USD    50.00 USD"

So this person works for 0.12-0.15 USD/word. Understandable.
How come everybody else has to work for 18.5%-14.6% of the payment this person considers appropriate for himself?
Apparently the poster assumes, that other translators work purely for fun (translation of philosophical material is definitely not easy) and don't have to pay the rent or buy food.
This is not "An American in Paris" but rather
"A Chinese in America".

Related articles

• China - "cheap is best" ...

Unbelievable! - Again

English: Graph showing Euro and Japanese yen exchange rate from January, 1999. 日本語: 1999年1月からのユーロと日本円の為替レートのグラフ。 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Again! One of the the MANY unbelievable job offers via Proz.com.

"Languages: Japanese to English
i need Japanese to English translation of 3250 Japanese Characters,
i need this urgent , within 10 hours.
Budget and payment details:
    Hide / show
    $10.00 USD to $10.00 USD total
    ($0.00 USD to $0.00 USD estimated per char)
    Further payment details: 10 $ for 3250 characters
    Estimation in your preferred currency (using today's conversion rate):
    797.885 JPY to 797.885 JPY total
    info Preferred expertise: Law/Patents"

3250 Japanese characters to be translated into English is according to the commonly applied rules here in Japan about 9 pages. Subject matter seems to patent related. In that case is the text everything but easy.
And the offered TOTAL payment is 10 USD.
That is 1.1 USD per page of patent translation from Japanese to English.

Everybody who wants to do it AND can make a living on that rate, please raise your hands.

This is definitely not the first time that sort of offer has been published on Proz.com. See also:
http://transcurio.blogspot.jp/2012/02/unbelievable.html

Cheap bus tour results in an accident killing 7 people

The other day an accident occurred on a Japanese highway, killing 7 people. The driver of a bus - a driver hired by the day - fell asleep. Apparently, there was no co-driver on the bus, and the entire tour designed to be "first of all cheap", specifically targeting Chinese customers.

The accident is one thing, but what struck me this morning was a TV show where one of the commentators said:
"It is this fierce competitions nowadays for providing cheaper and cheaper services/product, REQUIRING to cut costs where　ever possible, to has finally led to poor safety measures, the use of insufficiently qualified personnel etc. that led to the tragedy"

THIS sounds like something that could be applied IDENTICALLY to the translation business:
"lower your rates", "cut costs", "do NOT charge extra for rush jobs etc.", "no special expertise needed (= everybody can do it = makes prices cheap)".

Well, I tried to point this out many times already. Cutting costs to the bone, forcing "real" translators into starvation etc, WILL in the end lead to the use/employment of untrained, unskilled personnel with "no special expertise", whose inadequate translation make even lead to the death of people. Who knows??

Is THAT what clients want? It will certainly give them a few headlines.
Starving the real people in the end will force them to "recruit the crew for a space shuttle from a pool of cheap physical laborers with no special expertise". It will definitely cut costs, but will it benefit the space program?

Expertise - no expterise

Academic Book Stack (Photo credit: phonono)

Crimson Interactive (also known as Edisense, India based translation agency)

This company CONSTANTLY posts "job offers" on various sites, always offering hundreds of thousands of words = large volumes. Whether this is true or not is not really interesting here. (I have worked for them before. there were never any "large volume jobs". NATURALLY, after I started to work it did not take long before they started asking me to lower my rates - which I already DID set a little lower than the Japanese rates.)

The interesting thing is, the posts ALWAYS state at their top:
"Expertise:     No special expertise"

but a little further down it then ALWAYS (this text is ALWAYS IDENTICAL):

Description: ... This makes the position challenging ...
Eligibility Criteria:
• Should have minimum 2 to 3 years of experience in Academic Translation
• Should hold at least a bachelor's degree in any field
• Expertise in academic subjects
• Certifications in translation and/or academic translation would be preferred

Well, to me THAT looks definitely like "special expertise"!

Or am I missing something important here? Do not understand the text maybe?

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???