Ryan Ginstrom has a really interesting post (that links to yet another post) on translation quality. Besides learning the helpful term “chokuyaku” (apparently Japanese for “literal translation”), you can find out about one translator’s novel take on the “you get what you pay for” issue; this translator spends as much time on the project as the client has paid for. If it’s a low-paying client, he works as fast as he can and accepts that the quality is not great. I agree with Ryan that personally I could never do this, but it’s an interesting thought.
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[…] Lossner points out in his comment under a blog post about it. To complement the cycle, I quote Werner Patel’s explanation, found in another a blog comment, of how it can backfire on […]
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[…] Lossner points out in his comment under a blog post about it. To complement the cycle, I quote Werner Patel’s explanation, found in another a blog comment, of how it can backfire on […]
Clients get what they pay for. If they are too short-sighted to realize that they’re only hurting themselves by throwing peanuts at language professionals, they will eventually go out of business due to lack of quality and professionalism.
“Clients get what they pay for” is certainly not the attitude to take from the point of view of translators. Most professionals always do the best they can,in my humble opinion, and quality rather than money is the more important issue. The reason why quality is often poor is because of a slew of poor, under-educated professionals filling the market.
http://transubstantiation.wordpress.com/
The one person I know who practices a philosophy of “giving what the client has paid for” has quietly ruined his reputation with several of my clients in Germany. The guy is a super translator with an excellent technical education and some of the best skills I have encountered with leading CAT tools, but his refusal to go the extra mile (or kilometer here) to find the right term has put him on some blacklists with clients who are actually quite reasonable.
If nothing else, this post has given me a great idea for a new translation blog name… dibs!!
I’ve been translating for 40 years from French to English. When I was young and hungry, my prices were cheap and I was able to get started. I upped my prices slightly year to year, but when I got really good about 20 years later, I decided to charge about 25% more than the industry average. I learned that the best way to really distinguish yourself, is to put in the hours necessary so that all translations “sound like” they were originally written by a corresponding expert in English, while remaining true to the nuances of the French. Now I get less translation work, but I only do “prestige translations” such as fancy technical brochures at 2 to 3 times the going rate.
IOW, as a young man with 5 years experience, I might have agreed with the “low price, low quality” notion, but as an old man in search of excellence, I totally disagree.