standard rates for written translation

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Timothy Sergay wrote:

> 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.

In my experience, different categories of text expand different amounts 
-- legalese tends to expand more, ad copy less. But the single factor 
that is most important is how much time I have to draft and revise the 
translation. The more I revise, the more concise and natural the English 
becomes. My slapdash first drafts hew too closely to the Russian (in 
several respects), and while they may technically be "grammatical" and 
"understandable" English, they don't read like originals.

> 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.

Following onto my remarks above, an agency is reasonable in wanting 
translators to review and revise their copy before sending it in. There 
are obviously various schools of thought as to where to draw the line 
between the translator's job and the editor's, but as you say if you 
want repeat business, you have to minimize the agency's editing costs. 
If that wounds your pride, you'll have to find a stable of ignorant 
clients who accept whatever hash you send, and I'm sure that's not the 
Sergay way. But I have encountered successful "professional" translators 
who are very good at churning out natural-sounding English that bears 
only a cursory relationship to the source text, and while their direct 
clients may think they're getting a good translation because it reads 
well, I know better and choose not to hire them. Some of them were 
outraged at my choice, but I'd rather have /them/ outraged than my end 
client, and I'm not willing to put in all the extra hours it takes to 
revise their copy.

As you can see, I don't think anyone goes out of their way to pad their 
counts, but a few translators are far too lazy or cavalier for my taste.


P.S. Tim, please don't force replies to your personal address. Leave 
"Reply-To" blank so the discussion will continue on the list where all 
can enjoy it.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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