standard rates for written translation

[Renee Stillings]

To throw my two cents in on this, having reviewed quite a few translations
of primarily business texts into Russian. Josh is correct in that oddly
enough they can shrink - if the translator is thinking about getting the
point across rather than translating words. Much of this may have to do with
the original author of the text but often the Russian is fundamentally too
wordy. I think back to my technical writing class in college where the two
most important things I left with were the ability to keep things short and
to the point and to never use long words where a simpler short word serves
the same purpose. Oh, and drop all the crutch words. Russian, both written,
and verbal, is often littered with ambiguous (non-committal ...) terms like
"v principe," "vozmozhno," etc. In nearly all cases these can just be
dropped for the sake of good writing ... or speaking. I can't tell you how
many times a question along the lines of "How's the weather today?" is
answered by "V principe, kholodno." Is it or isn't it???

It may be that if the Russian piece is well written to begin with that this
shrinkage would not occur and perhaps there'd be more of a tendency toward
the expansion when translating into English. Thus fewer problems of this
nature in literature or professionally authored material - where we can
assume a degree of writing ability. We are often translating articles by
professionals in various areas of business - not writers, but lawyers,
accountants, etc. So the raw material has all the leanings of college first
drafts and the translation is actually very much an editing process, often
even prompting later revisions in the Russian.

Now, if such translations are being done commercially, often the client is
looking for more parallels and not that sort of liberty in cutting out
swathes of text just because one thinks it is frivolous. My first year out
of college was spent in a technical translation company and at various
stages gaps in text would be noted even by the peon such as myself just
running comparisons of numbers and units on a language we were not fluent
in. BTW, as a company, I am 99% positive the job was estimated on source
word count because that is the only set definition that can be evaluated by
both client and provider.

-----Original Message-----
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list
[mailto:SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Robert Chandler
Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2007 11:14 PM
To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] standard rates for written translation

I was speaking about words.

R.


> Could be, I've not had experience in editing or closely analyzing literary
> translations. 
> 
> However, there is inconsistency in the terminology being used in this
> conversation. Some folks are speaking about characters, others about
words.
> These are two very different things.

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