standard rates for written translation

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Combining responses to stay under the three-message-per-day limit:

Josh Wilson wrote:

> ... I'm not sure as to word boundaries, but I think your argument
> makes sense in the fact that English usually prefers short words.
> However, nearly every English translation (working mostly with
> business news articles) I've seen has been shorter than the Russian
> original in both terms of bulk and characters. It would seem to me,
> then, that paying according to character counts in the source
> language when the source language is usually longer would be
> preferable even for the translator....

Paying on source need not automatically be cheaper or more expensive. 
For example, if I know that my English translations contain 15% more 
words than the Russian source, and I want to charge 15 cents per English 
(target) word, but the client wants to pay on source, I merely adjust my 
rate to 17.25 cents per Russian word. The same documents will cost the 
same amount, but the calculation will differ: 1000 Russian words at 
17.25 cents is $172.50, but 1150 English words at 15 cents is $172.50.

Vera Beljakova wrote:

> I've come frequently across a dilemma... * do I make the copy sound 
> concise that reads well in English, but is not totally as deeply 
> detailed as the Russian text * or do I go for extreme accuracy and 
> mirror the Russian text which would translate every single clause, 
> every word practically.
> 
> Clients whom I do not charge high fees (those who need family 
> history/genealogy/letter translation/poetry paraphrased) get the more
> cumbersome but 100% accurate translation into English. It might not 
> be elegant and might not read like the original text, but I guarantee
> 100% factual accuracy where every nuance is reflected, and it is
> then up to the client to do what he wants with it. Such work is not 
> intended for publication but for research, therefore accuracy more 
> vital than elegance.
> 
> Articles for publication, of course, need elegant fluency - and 
> elegance often wins out at the expense of accuracy.

You raise an important point: the purpose of the translation. Part of 
understanding and serving the client well is understanding their purpose 
in ordering the translation, the intended use to which it will be put, 
the readership in the target language. Taken in a vacuum, translation 
should be "faithful" to the original document, but as we all know, the 
source document was written not simply in a different coding system 
(language), but in a different culture with a different set of 
assumptions, a different mindset, a different rhetorical style, etc. 
[insert plug for Gerhart's /Russian Context/ here] Put simply, a 
translation that is faithful to the explicitly expressed content will 
often fail to achieve the author's intended purpose in the target 
language. What will an American think if I speak of "making an elephant 
out of a fly," or perhaps more naturally, "making a fly into an 
elephant"? (assuming he's kind enough not to think I'm a total idiot...) 
  Given that reading is an active skill in which the reader integrates 
what he sees with what he already knows (and often with what he wants to 
know -- his purpose in reading), what happens when we replace the 
intended reader with one whose background and purpose are entirely 
different? We must conclude that there will be many "good translations" 
of a particular document -- as many as there are translation clients.

To address your question more directly, I agree that a genealogical 
translation must convey the essential genealogical information (who 
begat whom, etc.), but to the extent that the client wants to learn 
about how his/her ancestors lived, "who they were," it may also be 
important to convey that information as well, in a form the client can 
understand. Sometimes that means glossing unfamiliar terms such as 
"kvass" or supplying latitude/longitude for villages -- but that verges 
into research, and in that case I would ask the client whether that sort 
of information will be valuable enough to them to pay for my time.

Things would seem to be simpler with a technical article for 
publication, but even a British author will find that American tech 
journals have quite a different style, and his article may have to be 
revised in order to work well for this readership. The most difficult 
task is converting the Russian rhetorical style, built around passive 
and impersonal constructions where the verbs are disguised as nouns, 
into the more direct, active, verby American style. A Russian bureaucrat 
might say something like "the coloration of the wall was effected by the 
application of paint of green color" where we would say "we painted the 
wall green." ;-)

Renee Stillings wrote:

> 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.

... because Russian style places a higher premium on puffery (making the 
author seem important and/or erudite) than American style, whereas we 
are more concerned with getting our point across (at least those of us 
who know how to write effective English are).

> ... 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???

Listen to some man-in-the-street interviews on TV and you'll hear the 
same stalling tactics here -- "I mean," "you know," etc. In the 
presidential debates, you hear "the fact of the matter is" (which 
generally introduces a lie, but that's another kettle of worms)...

> ... 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.

On those occasions where I have access to the author, I have often 
consulted back and forth to fully understand their intent, and it's not 
uncommon for the author to discover that he wasn't very clear about an 
important point. Translators routinely hear that only they would have 
noticed little flubs such as "Ru-239" for "Pu-239" in a nuclear piece.

> 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.

I've always thought that type of "content check" was a complete waste of 
time and money, but if you don't have a TL reviewer at the company, what 
can you do? <whisper>hire a translation agency...</whisper>

-- 
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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