posted 18 February 2001 14:59            

What do you think?

posted 19 February 2001 19:28            

I can't wait to hear people's thoughts and reactions to the idea...

posted 20 February 2001 02:04            

I defined "rough draft" as meaning no retyping, hand corrections during proofreading, and tossing terminology problems in the client's lap rather than doing any extensive research. I finally gave up on offering "rough drafts" because there wasn't any significant time difference (especially now with revisions so easy on the computer), and sorting out terminology is really what I'm selling (although I'm deliriously happy to be able to consult with the client when possible). I can't even proofread intelligently until I know enough about what's going on, and except in some ultrasimple areas (anybody with some synthetic chemistry articles to translate, please pass them along quick!), this means extra reading and thinking.

Before anybody counsels me to specialize more narrowly - in my areas, not much would get translated if we stuck to areas directly related to our own research experience (or to simple stuff like the synthetic chemistry articles that I'm craving, even though I'm not even a good cook, much less a good synthetic chemist...). In many cases, if I can't do it, there aren't too many others who can (I have advanced training as both a chemist and a physicist with research experience in biology-related areas).

Other scientific/technical translators will probably agree that our background (formal or self-taught) is just a necessary starting point for our translation work - we are "literate" in our fields, but need to work at understanding the material most of the time regardless. This is certainly true when reading scientific and technical articles in our native language even supposedly in our own "fields", so it's not surprising that the same is true when we translate. Having a Ph.D. in chemical physics does not magically make the articles in Physical Review or the Journal of Chemical Physics or the Journal of Applied Physics instantly understandable...

Perhaps someone who is more often selling polished-for-general-publication translations would see a serious enough time-savings for "unpolished" work. In scientific work, we don't spend a lot of time "polishing" - we focus more on accuracy and reasonable clarity, and nobody expects us to be Hemingways. Other types of material may require much more time in the "polishing" stage.

But any translation (polished or not) will require the same basic steps: first draft, checking terms, checking the draft against the original and revising at least a bit during that process. It seems to me that any major time savings would occur only if ordinarily your revision time is a large chunk of this total process. If availability of the client for help with terminology would seriously reduce the time required, then maybe applying an hourly rate would be the most reasonable. We really our selling our time, after all, and we set per-word rates just to average out to a reasonable per-hour rate.

Peace, Cathy Flick cathyf@infocom.com

Ph.D. Chemical Physics/M.A. Physics/B.S. Chemistry
Scientific Translator since 1978
Russian/French/German/Spanish/Italian into US English

posted 22 February 2001 16:16            

"We can do it FAST.
We can do it CHEAP.
We can do it GOOD.

You pick any 2 out of 3."

The point of view that is novel to many of us, who are used to the idea that we must always give it our BEST, is this: that it is up the client to decide which 2 out of the 3 are important to HIM/HER, given his/her situation, and the circumstances under which s/he needs the translation.

However...we are all free to decide what combination of services we do and do not offer.
If we want to, we can decide that we do not offer all the possible combinations. A discussion in my household brought out this point: If we accept to do a job that is "fast" and "cheap", but not "good", what effect might this have on our future reputation? The sub-standard translation associated with our name might be all that someone knows of us, and we might not have the chance to defend our reputation with the explanation that this is what suited the client's needs in the particular circumstance.

posted 22 February 2001 17:44            

quote:

---

Originally posted by Margaret:
If we accept to do a job that is "fast" and "cheap", but not "good", what effect might this have on our future reputation? The sub-standard translation associated with our name might be all that someone knows of us, and we might not have the chance to defend our reputation with the explanation that this is what suited the client's needs in the particular circumstance.

---

This is of course an excellent point and is probably the main reason why most people would shy away from doing this kind of work.

We certainly would shy away. But I can see that in some cases there would be a need for it.

------------------

Alex Eames
http://www.translatortips.com
helping translators do better business

posted 23 February 2001 23:37            

And depending on the language awareness of the person you're in contact with they may simply not believe how long it can take. You speak both languages, you can "just do it" to borrow a phrase. Bit cheeky of you wanting to be paid as well really, at least that's the feeling you can sometimes get, isn't it? It certainly is for French-English work anyway ("I would have done it myself but I'm too busy"), I assume it can't be as true for the rarer languages.

So we have to get clients to understand somehow that

a) translating properly isn't something anyone with more than one language can "just do" and

b)there are more potential drawbacks than they might have thought of in a "lesser quality" translation, and I mean for them, not just for us.

Of course, we don't want to be judged unfairly on deliberately unpolished work (and I agree with JWE, I'm not convinced about the time savings) - but have they really thought what they themselves are going to do with it? Wouldn't they be better off having a proper quality text to work from or use - especially if the translated document is going to be "in a foreign language" for other users too (eg a French report translated into English so that their Danish/Japanese clients can read it - not ideal but not unusual)? Is a request for "lesser quality" translations really an attempt to reduce their costs?

People are often surprised initially at the price of translations - again, because they haven't thought what goes into it. A language teacher I know used to complain that nobody would ask a plumber to "just" fix their toilet for them, but since he spoke Spanish, he was often asked to translate letters and stuff - informally of course, and no payment offered!

When necessary and possible, contacting the client with (intelligent) queries can actually open their eyes to some of what's involved. Without going so far as to suggest you should ask a question you don't really need to, in order to show that you really know your way round the subject I've generally found that this increases their respect for your work.

However, this doesn't eradicate the time problem. I've noticed that in big organisations a surprising amount of mediocre quality stuff is in circulation, and it's because of the time constraints. If it's more important to your client to have something on time, rather than receive a superb document two days after that vital meeting, I wouldn't turn the job down - assuming I believe I can do it.

Good communication and tact is vital. If you begin by telling them that they're stupid for wanting the impossible (even if it's true),they may think you're a pernickety, pompous little translator with ideas above your station (this could also be true but that's the translator's personal problem Then they won't come back to you - and they might decide not to have it done professionally at all... You won't be able to change their deadline, but you can make sure they register the difficulty of the station, politely and in writing if necessary.

It's up to us to measure the amount of risk involved and decide accordingly.

posted 19 April 2001 16:18            

I know this thread has been inactive for a while, but I just recently joined and find this topic interesting!

One thing I see lacking in this discussion is a definition of what is meant by good/poor quality. I could justify producing a *stylistically* less-than-ideal translation (as long as it is still accurate and complete) if the customer wanted a text for "information purposes only." (That said, I would stamp "not for publication" in big letters all over it!)

To expand on what I mean by stylistically "poor" - if I were doing a "quick and dirty" translation like this, I would concentrate on the meaning rather than the style, so would not stop to polish up several sentences in a row with the same structure, repetitions, somewhat awkward sentence structure, general lang. words rather than buzzwords, etc. as long as there were no meaning shifts.

What I could not justify is something that contained errors or omissions. Even if "lesser quality" was agreed with the customer ahead of time, this type of thing could really come back to haunt you as Margaret said in another post.