Training for Translators

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Corinne McKay

Passing as "one of them": the client Turing test

During Speaking of Translation’s recent interview with Chris Durban (recording online for free, at that link), Chris mentioned an excellent quality metric for specialized translators: the 10-minute Turing test. A Turing test involves a human attempting to determine if he/she is having a discussion with a computer or with another human. For example, many of you probably remember the ELIZA program, which simulated a psychiatric consultation and was often considered as having passed the Turing test. And as a complete aside, if you’re interested in Alan Turing and his era, you really have to read Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, often described as “the ultimate geek novel.”

But back to Chris’ advice. In order to pass the translation client Turing test, she advises that we translators should be able to pass as professionals in our field(s) of specialization for at least ten minutes. For example if you’re a medical translator, you should be able to attend a medical conference and at the end of a ten-minute technical conversation with other attendees, you reveal that you’re actually a translator and the attendees say “I can’t believe you’re not a doctor/nurse/medical instrument engineer/etc.” For example, Chris does financial translation for some of France’s leading corporations. During the webinar, she pointed out that this Turing test goal motivates her to stay on top of the world financial news (i.e. the Greek debt crisis), not just the specific topics about which she translates. This gives her greater credibility with her clients, differentiates her from kinda-sorta-specialized financial translators and greases the wheels of conversation when she meets her clients in person.

Fabulous advice: now let’s look at how this works in practice. About six months ago, I decided that I wanted to deepen my own knowledge of international development, one of my primary areas of specialization. I’m not sure I’m at the “I thought you worked for the World Bank!” point yet, but I do feel like I’m improving. Here’s an outline of what I did, and of course feel free to add your own experiences as well.

  • Took some baby steps. I joined the Society for International Development which gets me a subscription to their excellent professional journal, information about their events, and the all-important membership card (wait, maybe I am already an expert!). I also signed up for e-mail newsletters from entities such as Devex, which got me somewhat tuned in to the international development buzz: who’s hiring, who’s working where, who’s in the news all the time, that kind of thing.
  • Plugged in to social media. I started following a bunch of international development entities on Twitter, and I also started reading some blogs that I pegged as the more widely-read international development blogs. These included Owen Abroad, NextBillion, Partners in Health, USAID Impact and Global Development: Views from the Center. As Chris commented, I found that these blogs were not exclusively, or even primarily, related to the work that I do. Some of these blogs don’t relate at all to French-speaking countries that receive international development aid. But all of them relate to the sector as a whole, and that’s really helped broaden my knowledge. I also feel much more informed about some of the “hot” issues in international development, such as pay-for-performance development funding, in which countries get aid based on the results that they achieve, not on the programs that they plan to implement.
  • Got a teeny tiny bit involved. Over time, I mustered the courage to comment on some of these blogs. I’m not sure that anything earthshaking came of it, but I felt like for once, I had done some actual contributing and networking outside the translation industry.
  • Forced myself to do extra research. I’ve been translating French international development documents long enough that I know the terminology pretty well. But on my recent projects, I’ve forced myself to go beyond terminology and do some real research. There’s a big difference between knowing that chaîne du froid means “cold chain” and being able to explain what a cold chain is, why it’s so hard to maintain one in a developing country, what happens when it malfunctions and how new technology like solar power is changing the appliances that can be used in the cold chain. I found this research both very time-consuming and very satisfying.

There’s still room for improvement. I really need to attend some in-person events, and I just couldn’t work my schedule around last week’s Society for International Development World Congress. I also really need to have some one-on-one meetings with people who work in international development to find out how their translation procurement works (most of my current ID clients have come as referrals, or they found me rather than the other way around). But overall, I feel like this effort has really boosted my confidence and competence. Thanks to Chris for this great advice!


Corinne McKay

Working with direct clients: tips from Chris Durban

This morning, Eve Bodeux and I (in our incarnation as Speaking of Translation) did an interview with superstar translator Chris Durban, focusing on her tips for working with direct clients. Whether you’re just testing the direct client waters or you’ve been in the direct client market for a while, Chris has lots of practical tips and insights that you can apply right away. There’s a free recording of the webinar on the Speaking of Translation website; it’s the first entry under “Free webinar recordings.” You can also join us on August 24 for “Getting Started as a Freelance Translator” which I’ll be presenting. Information about that is here and the cost is $35 until August 15 and $40 after that. Hope to see you there!


Corinne McKay

Some thoughts on hourly and salaried pay

In the early days of Thoughts on Translation (March, 2008 to be exact), I wrote a post on charging by the word versus charging by the hour. For a long time, it was the most active post on my blog and it inspired some interesting and heated discussion. Get Rich Slowly’s post today is on hourly versus salaried jobs and it got me thinking about this issue again.

The translation industry complicates this issue in a couple of ways:

  • We’re normally paid by the word, rather than by the hour
  • For whatever reason, most translation agencies will pay much more per word than per hour (in relative terms, not just absolute terms)
  • Most of us don’t rigorously track our output, so we don’t really know how much we make per hour
  • We usually work from home, so the client has only a vague idea of how long a given job takes us

Confused yet?

My first job in the translation industry was as an FBI contract linguist; a job that pays by the hour. Looking back, I see some advantages and disadvantages. On the up side, there’s much less incentive to rush through a translation when you know that whether you produce 1,000 words an hour or 100 words an hour, you get paid the same amount. I think that a lot of translators use the per-word payment model as a rationale for doing a less than thorough job: why take an hour to research one term if you’re getting paid 15, 20 or even 50 cents for it? When you’re paid by the hour, you don’t have that egg timer full of pennies hanging over your head and you can take as long as the translation requires.

However, being paid by the hour removes the translator’s incentive to work more efficiently. In the comments on my original post, a few people pointed out that while there may be a fairly narrow range of per-word rates in our industry, experienced translators undoubtedly earn more than beginners (even if they charge the same amount per word) because they work much faster. Translators might be motivated to learn new software or to focus in a very specialized area because they know that their speed, and thus their income, will go up.

The confusing part of this is the disparity between the per-word and hourly rates that our industry will bear. For example, if a translator works with agencies, charges 15 cents per word and produces 500 finished words per hour, he/she is earning $75 an hour; and I think that both of those figures are realistic for experienced translators. But I have yet to hear of an agency that will pay $75 an hour for projects that are billed hourly; if I had to hazard a guess at the average agency rate (not a pricing recommendation, just my unscientific guess), I would say $35-$50 per hour is more common.

At an ATA conference years ago, I attended an excellent presentation on business practices by Jonathan Hine. His argument for charging by the hour for editing is that it’s a zero loss risk situation. Rather than taking the risk of receiving a poor translation and re-translating it for 4 cents a word, the editor can charge by the hour and be guaranteed of being compensated for all of the time that the edit takes. Maybe the reverse phenomenon is at work here; agencies would rather pay a higher per-word rate for translation, because then they know exactly how much the job will cost? Feel free to add your own thoughts on this!


Corinne McKay

What about TM discounts?

During the recent discussion on volume discounts, a number of readers brought up the (very valid) issue of translation memory discounts. I feel a can of worms about to open here, but I’ll inject some of my thoughts on TM discounts.

First caveat: I am neither a huge fan of nor a heavy user of TM. I own and use both OmegaT and Wordfast, and I really like both of them for different reasons. However because my favorite kind of work is translation that requires excellent writing, I only use TM when necessary. I find that because of the “chunked” nature of working in a TM tool, the flow of my writing really suffers when I use one. I do gain a pretty significant speed advantage when using TM, but I find that if the document needs to sound really natural in English, the extra editing time eats up the time I saved during the translation.

That being said, there are some projects where it would be suicidal not to use a TM. I work on several recurring projects for international development entities. These might involve multiple countries submitting funding applications using the same template, so it would be a huge waste of time to start each application from scratch. In those cases, I’m all about TM leverage.

There are two basic sides to the TM discount debate:

  • Agency says: if some of the content in this document is recycled from a TM that we provide, why should we pay the translator’s full rate for the recycled portion? The TM is the result of work that we paid for originally, so we want to realize the benefit of it.
  • Translator says: I purchased the TM tool and used my own time to learn to use it. I pay for the upgrades and for the computer system that runs the TM. The time that I save by using the TM is a result of this investment, and I want to realize the benefit of it.

Over the years, I’ve struggled with the issue of TM discounts. In some specializations (i.e. software and documentation), the situation may be different from what I experience. But I find that editing fuzzy matches (i.e. anything below 100%) takes at least as long and sometimes longer than just translating the segment from scratch. Therefore, the only TM discount that I offer is that if the client is extremely confident in the reliability of the TM that they provide, I will not charge for 100% matches if I accept them without proofreading them. Meaning that in Wordfast Classic, if a segment shows up green (Wordfast’s color code for a 100% match), I just click Alt-down (Wordfast’s command for accepting a segment) without reading it. I feel that for clients who put in the work to maintain a reliable TM, this is a fair compromise. But because I’ve run the numbers on the time it takes to edit fuzzy matches, I don’t offer TM discounts other than this.

Other thoughts?


Corinne McKay

Some thoughts on volume discounts

I get lots of questions from beginning and experienced translators about volume discounts (charging a lower per-word or hourly rate for larger projects). I actually think that after “how much should I charge?”, “should I offer a volume discount” might be the second most frequently-asked question that I see. Here are a few thoughts, and feel free to add your own.

When I first started translating, I enthusiastically offered volume discounts. During my first year as a freelancer I worked about 10 hours a week and made $9,000. Seriously- there’s no zero missing! Out of that $9,000, $2,000 came from just one project on which I gave a substantial volume discount. Why? Because I didn’t have much work, and working for less than my standard rate was a lot more appealing than not working at all. Flash forward nine years, and I recently realized that not only do I not offer a volume discount any more, but sometimes I actually impose what might be considered a volume surcharge. Why? Because I have enough work at my standard rates and a volume discount would put me in the position of turning down other projects at my standard rate. However, I will sometimes do a small project at a lower rate as a favor to one of my regular clients. It helps them out, it doesn’t tie up too much of my time at a lower rate and it shows the client that I’m willing to show some flexibility within reasonable limits.

Volume discounts have their place. I think that the principle of volume discounts is fair: if a client guarantees you a week or two of work, you get to spend all of that time on the clock. Your administrative overhead is a lot lower, because you’re dealing with one client and one invoice rather than 10 clients and 10 invoices. You will probably work faster as you “ramp up” on the project rather than switching gears twice a day. You don’t have to stress out about juggling multiple projects because you’re just plugging away on The Big One. But when your client base grows, you have less of an incentive to offer a volume discount: you’re not desperate for the work, you’re busy most or all of the time anyway, and if you’re too busy, it’s time to raise your rates!