standard rates for written translation

[Timothy Sergay]

Dear Josh and SEELANGers,

When I was actively freelancing as a translator I occasionally compared
word counts of Russian originals and my English translations; if memory
serves I noticed about an 8-10% increase in word count going from Russian
to English, while character counts would be significantly closer to each
other. I attributed this to the underlying linguistic fact that Russian is
synthetic while English is analytic. I still think that's correct, but
maybe SEELANGers with stronger backgrounds in linguistics could weigh in
on this. In other words, verbosity in the target language (English) wasn't
the issue: it was the fact that the English noun system requires all kinds
of articles and prepositions to convey what Russian nouns convey through
the case system and often without prepositions, while the English verbal
system requires auxiliaries while the Russian verbal system can even
dispense with repeating the subject pronoun. I do understand why someone
translating, say, lists of terms from English to Russian would conclude
that English is more concise than Russian as a whole (Russian terms
compared to English often look like periphrases -- we can say "toenail
clippers" in English while Russian seems to require things like "nozhnitsy
dlia nogtei pal'tsev nog"). But I think the general fact is that in
semantically equivalent blocks of text, English will naturally have more
word boundaries than Russian.

As for charging translation clients, for all these reasons I think
charging by character count (and judging "verbosity" likewise by character
count) rather than word count makes sense and is a good use of the
advantages created by computerized word processing.

As for never paying based on target-language counts at all so as to
encourage brevity, you may have arrived at this idea, Josh, through bitter
experience, but speaking as a translator, I find it hard to imagine anyone
really worth their salt in this business going out of their way to
deliberately pad a word count. Padding your word count is hardly the way
to acquire repeat clients, and in any case, it's hard enough just to get
things right semantically and recreate stylistic attributes as far as
possible. I've met colleagues who take great personal umbrage at payment
practices that imply that they must be vigilantly "incentivized" against
verbosity in their work.

Best wishes to all,
Tim Sergay

> As someone who often pays for translation, I can tell you that the
> arrangement I usually use runs as follows:
>
> I pay for translations based on a character count in the source language.
> I
> would never pay based on the target language as that would not encourage
> brevity, which I highly value as an editor working in the English
> language.
> Usually pay is figured at some sum per 1800 characters

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