Source or Target?

efreitag wrote:



Dear Henry,

I can't quite see why a difference in word count would lead to a different pricing strategy. Imho, the question of whether to charge per source or target word is not a question of the individual languages involved. Instead, the rate for a specific language direction should reflect differences in word count. If translating from language A to language B expands the text by 30%, and my source word rate is X, than my target word rate in this language direction should be approx. 77% of X.

Just my 2 cents
Erik

Marc P wrote:

1. The whole notion of selling translation by weight is flawed. The effort required to translate ten words can vary hugely depending upon a number of factors, of which the relative expansion between a given language pair is only one. The word (or character, or multiples of them) has proved to be a practical billing unit, but it remains practical only as long as the parties involved recognize that it is a flawed system, and that the actual numbers have to be considered on a case-by-case basis. Anyone who thinks that x amount of words automatically equals y amount of effort should be selling sausages, not translation services.

2. In theory, billing by the quantity of source text enables the customer to know in advance what he is going to pay. But in that case, why mention the number of words at all? The translator can, after reviewing the text and estimating the time and effort involved, offer an all-inclusive price which takes into account not only the volume and the language pair, but also the level of difficulty of the text. Not mentioning the number of words would help to dispel the myth that x amount of words automatically equals y amount of effort, and banish the silly conclusions which follow from this assumption, such as that "she ate 4 apples" somehow involves less effort to translate than "she ate four apples".

3. The suggestion that charging by source volume prevents translators from being verbose in order to bump up the price is, frankly, an insult to the profession, and the fact that it does not prompt an outcry here confirms my view that this venue cannot be described as a professional site. My electrician, plumber and solicitor all charge by the hour, but I cannot imagine anyone suggesting, at an online venue for electricians, plumbers or solicitors, that charging by the hour allows them to work more slowly in order to earn more, and that they should therefore charge by the number of hand movements instead. Customers must be able to trust their translators, and it's a sorry state of affairs if they can't even have that much confidence in them.

4. Tim has explained the issue of expansion between different languages very eloquently. In fact, I think Tim is at an advantage in translating from Turkish, since the agglutinative structure of Turkish makes an expansion in the word count of 70% easier to explain. Technical German to English can easily result in an expansion of 20%, but that relatively low figure and the linguistic closeness of the two languages makes it much harder to explain to a customer why the per-word price should be in the order of 20% higher than for the opposite direction. Although I agree with Tim that character-based counts reduce this discrepancy considerably (and almost all my work is billed by the target character), it could equally be argued that the blatant flaws in the per-word system actually make it easier to explain, to customers and colleagues, the inherent flaws of a volume-based system, and to establish more case-specific pricing strategies.

Marc

Marc P wrote:
1. The whole notion of selling translation by weight is flawed. The effort required to translate ten words can vary hugely depending upon a number of factors, of which the relative expansion between a given language pair is only one.