Last night I was working on a translation of a news article; there was a quote from an expert in the article, so I Googled it to see if the quote appeared in English somewhere on the web. Interestingly enough, what popped up was a translation of the entire article. Enter a dilemma, and one that has various ethical and financial gradations. In this situation, I was able to talk to my client on the phone and explain the situation; since the translation was a rush job and due in a few hours, we decided that I would simply go ahead and do the translation as if the online version didn’t exist, but the situation is not always this clear. Following are a few “déjà lu” (already read!) experiences I’ve had and how I’ve handled them.
Situation: You find a translation of your document online. Some people would argue that if the client isn’t willing to spend a few minutes searching for an existing translation, it’s not unfair to go ahead and translate the document and charge the client for it. Personally, I always alert the client in a situation like this and offer to stop translating and be paid only for what I’ve already done, because if the existing translation is high-quality, it seems like a waste of effort to produce another one.
Situation: You have previously translated a document that’s very similar to what you’re working on, but for another client. Here, I think that it’s a case of “leveraging your previous work” and it’s fair to charge the client your full rate. I’ve run into this situation with insurance contracts, where two different clients sent me two insurance contracts that were 90% similar because they were issued by the same company. My take on this: when you have your will written up, the attorney doesn’t charge less because she already has boilerplate documents prepared. As long as the document was for another client, I don’t see a problem with charging full price.
Situation: You have previously translated a document that’s very similar to what you’re working on, and it was for the same client. Here, I’m inclined to err on the side of honesty. I would probably explain the situation to the client and offer to charge by the hour for reviewing the new document and making the changes. I think it’s a little greedy to ask a client to pay you for 8,000 words when they already paid you to translate 7,500 of the same words.
Situation: You’re translating a corporate document, and the text, or something close to it, is already on the company’s website. I think this issue can be argued from both sides. In one sense, the company should be checking that it doesn’t already have a translation of what it’s sending out. In another sense, if the document is sent out for translation, there may be a reason the company wants a new or different translation. I would probably verify with the client, but I don’t think it’s absolutely dishonest not to.
I recently did a test translation for an agency in Europe. I found two of the three passages practically verbatim on the Internet (one in a EU pharmaceuticals database and the other as a sample on ProZ.com). I debated what to do in this case as well. I ended up reviewing the translations and making a couple changes I felt were necessary, but also let the client know and gave them the URLs where I had found the translations. They appreciated my honesty and decided to view it as a testimony of my research skills (and were rightly concerned about the sample on ProZ, because it violated their confidentiality agreement).
However, I once found an extensive quality assurance manual online that I aligned and fed into my TM. I had to change the company name, but otherwise it was pretty good quality. In this case, I chose to say nothing to the client because I had reviewed each word and sentence to ensure they were correct and correctly interpreted.
I guess it all depends on how much work is involved. After all, charging by the word is simply a unit we use to be reimbursed for our work. It truly is a tightrope sometimes. I agree with you in just about all the cases you cited though.
Corinne,
You’re right, tricky situation. Sometimes, honesty endears you more to a client, other times not.
I had a strange situation a few years ago where I assigned three similar contract to 3 translators. When they returned them, Translator A sent back the translation corresponding to Translator B. But Translator B also did Contract B. I thought I was going crazy; whenever I use multiple translators, I triple check that everyone gets what they’re supposed to.
Turns out Translator A had done the “B” document for another agency at an earlier time and sent it to me by mistake. I called and he did, in fact, do the “A” document, too, for me, which he sent right away. Now this wasn’t a situation where he recycled an older translation (who knows, maybe he did “A” in the past too?), which I suppose he has a right to do, but I warned him to be more careful with his organizational skills.
Jill and Glenn, thanks for your comments! Glenn, I love the story about your translator sending the wrong document! Rule #1 of recycling your own work should definitely be the “triple check.” Jill, what a mess with the sample translations, I guess that’s all you needed to do to give evidence of your superior research skills!
I’ve had this happen to me a few times, but I’ve never gone so far as to do part of the translation before discovering the existing version . . . Each time I spotted the translation already out there during my preparatory research.
I always report the find to the client right away. It usually means I don’t do that particular job, but it does lead to repeat work for “that trustworthy translator.” (And yes, I imagine it pays off in the form of impressing clients with your research aptitude, too.)
I translated a book that contained lengthy passages that had been copied from a Japanese translation of an old English book. In the process of E-J-J-E everything was changed around enough that the client (a publisher unrelated to the authors of any of these things) didn’t care when I mentioned it, but the basic arrangement of the sentences and paragraphs was all there for me to see. Very helpful.
Case 1: they may want a different translation (somebody else may own copyright on that existing news article translation.) I’d ask, if they’d left me time, or finish the job myself, if they hadn’t.
Case 2: I agree — that’s a new translation. I’d charge them.
Case 3: If they gave me a fresh un-OCRable PDF for the new translation, I’d have no qualms at all about charging them again. If they’re sufficiently organized to have machine-readable and therefore TMable documents, I’d charge only for new words.
Case 4: I’d ask them.
Actually, I guess all that is a wordy way of agreeing with everything you said…
This happened to me last week. I was translating a document from Spanish into English and halfway through ended up finding what was apparently the original in English, in its entirety, on the company’s website.
I notified the project manager and asked what to do. Since it was a rush job, he told me to copy the online version and charge half. Not sure if those savings were passed on to the client, but I assume they were.
@Daniel, thanks for your comment. The existing translation situation always seems to result in odd situations, doesn’t it. In your case, it seems a little strange that the PM decided to charge the company for copying and pasting what was already on their website, but I think that this type of thing is always a little ambiguous! The situation I had was a rush job too, and the PM told me to ignore the existing version and do my own translation; there just doesn’t seem to be a standard.