helping

tranfree issue 16 - 7th July 2000

"Lessons Learned the Hard Way"

 

Welcome to issue 16 of tranfree - the newsletter for translators.

I hope that all those of you who are in the US had a good holiday for your independence day celebrations.

We had a great response from potential article contributors last month. John McCarthy wrote a particularly nice article which I am including in this edition.

So, if you can write informative and fun articles like John's, and you are interested in getting paid for writing regular or occasional interesting articles relating to the translation industry, please send an email to...

tranfreeteam@translatortips.com

I will then email you the submission guidelines and policy.

Alex

Alex Eames
tranfree editor, Author -
How to Earn $80,000+ per Year as a Freelance Translator

 

 

this tranfree contains...

 

 

Letter of the Month

Short and sweet this month, so there are two of them...

"Dear Alex

I downloaded your book yesterday and read it all in one night! Such was the power of the book to capture the attention. Congratulations on a great product."

Andrea Campbell

eBook URL...
http://www.translatortips.net/ht50.html


"Dear Alex,

Your tranmail update again brought me a new excellent client from Belgium on the next day after my mailing to first 100 agencies from your list!

Now I have no time again to continue my mailing campaign because I have too much work to do. Also I am able to say "no thank you [edited ]" to those who send me tests. (I am sure almost all (only almost) tests suck due to lack of reference material, in-house terminology/professional slang and "Pray who are the judges" factor.)"

Andrei E. Gerasimov, Ph.D. http://www.aha.ru/~gerasae

tranmail URL...
http://www.translatortips.net/tranmail.html

 

 

    This tranfree's Feature Articles...

  1. Do You Play PowerPoint? - Alex Eames
  2. Out in the world - Interpreters Beware! - John McCarthy

 

 

translatortips.com Linkers FREE Prize Draw

I am keen to get as many of you as possible who have your own web sites to link to the translatortips.com web site. To encourage you all to put a link to translatortips.com on your own site, I am holding a monthly prize draw for everyone who does this. Each month all those people who have put a link on their own web site to the translatortips.com site (and let me know about it) will go into a ballot and the winner gets a FREE translatortips.com product of their choice from the following...

this winner is Martina Pauly - please contact me within the next 3 months to claim your prize from the above selection.

If you wish to put a link to the translatortips.com site on your site you can find instructions at the bottom of this edition.

 

 

Questions and Answers

Should I give away my glossary?

This question was posted on the translatortips.com message board by glenn on May 10, 2000...

http://www.translatortips.net/translator-bb/


How to handle the customer who wants your terminology to give to other translators (agencies) to insure consistency as the volume of work to be translated grows too large for one to complete in the time scheduled.

Your words cannot be found in online dictionaries. Other translators who have not invested the years of working in the specific field will not know the words. It is your bread and butter! But now for the good of the customer and the product, you must provide the terminology db to others. What protections are available?

A) Give it to him and perhaps lose or "shorten" your job

B) Sell it to him and perhaps lose your job (others are now faster)

C) Don't do it and lose your job

D) Share in the transmission to other translators? i.e., negotiate a percentage of its use by others? Negotiate a long term contract for translation work? How? Any sample successful, contracts out there? Your experiences please. Thanks in advance.


Glenn, that's one of the most interesting questions anyone has asked for quite some time.

I actually can't give you the black and white answer you would probably like to have. But maybe I can thrash around some thoughts.

At the end of the day it totally depends on the relationship and history you have with the client. If the client is worth several thousand a year to you, it is in your interest to do everything you can to protect that relationship - take his children to school if he asks you to!

If it is a new client and you don't know them well, you would obviously want to be a lot more cautious.

So, taking your options one by one...

A) Give it away

I would be very reluctant to give away something as valuable as that. I assume you are talking about a large personal glossary that you have compiled over the years or a translation memory database?

Frankly, it totally depends upon the relationship you have with the client and the tools they already own.

If the client owns a translation memory package they could quite easily extract this information for themselves from all your previous work with them - and give it to the others without your permission. This seems to be a very grey area of copyright law because the technology is so new.

There is a very circular argument which goes something like this...

According to the international copyright laws, a translator owns copyright in the translated text...

But a translation is a derivative work of the original document, so theoretically the original copyright holder owns the rights to it - unless permission and agreement has been obtained for the translation to be done.

But the translation memory/DB is a derivative of a derivative, which makes the already muddy waters even muddier. There will no doubt be some test cases in a few years when the technology becomes mature enough to be in more widespread use.


B) Sell it

This option is better if you can get the right balance and you have a trusting relationship with the client. How many people is he allowed to send copies of your DB to? i.e. how many licenses are you selling?

Some of the newer firms actually incorporate glossarisation as part of the job (and pay an extra fee for it). You then build a glossary as you go along, which can be used for future work.

I have one such client for whom I do US --> UK localisation of large web sites. They usually allow a few hours time for glossary building. This is paid for and it is obviously understood that it may/will be used for future work (by them, me or someone else - I don't care - I got paid for it).

I think you are probably talking about a much bigger thing. If you are really talking about a large DB then you should expect quite a lot of money for it. Realistically it is worth a lot more to you than someone else will probably be willing to pay you for it, so selling it may not be a viable option.


C) Don't do it

This is certainly a viable option when you don't trust the client. But having said that, if you don't trust them - don't work for them unless they pay you in advance!

You are right though, if the client asks you for something and you don't do it, you can probably consider them an ex-client unless you can explain things to them really well.


D) Sharing - royalties

Very hard to enforce this. It would only work when there is complete trust. Even then - if the client licenses 5 copies from you, how do you ensure that each of the 5 people do not give out 5 more copies? Unless you spend a lot on copy protection you can't enforce this at all.


D2) Long-term contract

This is something I have not ventured into as I don't like to be tied down. For us, each new job is a separate contract and that's the way we like it. It gives us the freedom to say no thank you when we are busy, need time off or want to do other things.

The part of freelance which I like the best is the FREE part. I think long-term contracts can potentially make you a virtual employee [which I see as a step backwards]. If you structure it right, though I guess it can work out well.

 

 

Translation Joke

More foreign travel funnies...

In a hotel in Vienna...
In case of fire, do your best to alarm the hotel porter.

In a Bucharest hotel lobby...
The lift is being fixed for the next day. During that time we regret that you will be unbearable.

In a Belgrade hotel elevator...
To move the cabin, push button for wishing floor. If the cabin should enter more persons, each one should press a number of wishing floor. Driving is then going alphabetically by national order.

In another Hotel...
The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid.

In a Paris hotel elevator...
Please leave your values at the front desk.

 

Christian Faucheux runs META the spiritual linguist newsletter which contains a lot of language and translation related jokes http://www.all-languages.com/bulletin.html

 

***End of issue 16***