| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4 5] > | Hourly rates like any other industry service Thread poster: Maria-da-Fé Albuquerque
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Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 17:37
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Maria-da-Fé Albuquerque wrote:
Sorry, I also disagree here. A repetition, when paid (when there is a rate to consider, that is what we are talking about), does cost the translator some time, of course. If not, then the translator is not doing his/her job. A repetition is a word that the translator has to review, read, evaluate and sometimes correct/change. If there are 10.000 repetitions, there are 10.000 words to review. 10.000 words do cost some time to review, even more so if there are corrections to be made to those repetitions.
Do you use a CAT tool ? A repetition is automatically generated. If you translate 'X' by 'Z', and 'X' occurs multiple times in your document, all the 'Z's' will be automatically populated. The only line you should review is the first occurrence of 'X'. Of course, if you make a mistake there, that same mistake will appear in all occurrences. But any translator which is any good won't let that happen. It would be like editing a text and missing a translation error: unprofessional.
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 17:37
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
| Source word versus target word | Apr 26, 2023 |
Marina Taffetani wrote:
I've just come across this page, which is actually about copywriters, although IMO what it says can be applied to translators as well
How can you compare a profession that is paid per target word to a profession that is paid per source word ? It's totally different concept.
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 17:37
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Philip Lees wrote:
No work at all? Really? You mean you don't even check them?
...on what you understand by 'checking'. I always make sure that I 'see' them, so I can make a quick decision if the context is still the same or if there could be a reason to re-verify the segment thoroughly. But this is a very fast process (a bit like 'scrolling') that can hardly be desribed as 'spending time'.
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Lieven Malaise wrote:
If you translate 'X' by 'Z', and 'X' occurs multiple times in your document, all the 'Z's' will be automatically populated. The only line you should review is the first occurrence of 'X'.
If this is true for your language pair, then I think you are one of those who should be worried about being replaced by MT, as eventually the software will fill in every single segment as a 100% match, based on an enormous library of previously scanned vocabulary. It's possible this is already happening, and the agency doesn't even need to send you those jobs.
In my language pair, it is certainly not true that "The only line you should review is the first occurrence of 'X'".
That is why I don't use CAT software in that way and don't offer any discounts for "matches".
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Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 17:37
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Lingua 5B wrote:
It’s not about words at all. It’s about concepts and they can’t be measured with anything. You can perhaps measure apples or oranges the way you described/ per piece.
I have no doubt this argument works extremely well with all potential customers that would like to pay per word.
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 17:37
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Philip Lees wrote:
In my language pair, it is certainly not true that "The only line you should review is the first occurrence of 'X'".
That is why I don't use CAT software in that way and don't offer any discounts for "matches".
... it is certainly true for the large majority of repetitions.
But there seems to be a misunderstanding about the amount of repetitions. I'm not pretending that I don't have to translate half of my documents because they are stuffed with repetitions. I also translate a lot of documents that contain no repetitions at all. Please understand that I translate on average the equivalent of 20000 new words per week, in a large variety of specializations. That's a lot of text and a lot of completely different texts.
| | | | Samuel Murray 
Netherlands
Local time: 17:37
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
| Whether repetitions need to be checked | Apr 26, 2023 |
Lieven Malaise wrote:
Do you use a CAT tool ? A repetition is automatically generated. If you translate 'X' by 'Z', and 'X' occurs multiple times in your document, all the 'Z's' will be automatically populated.
Yes, but you're assuming that the translation of a sentence will always be suitable for all contexts. And that is not always the case.
The fact that the identical sentence is suitable in the source text doesn't mean that an identical sentence would be suitable in the target text. The translator has to look at each of the repetitions and evaluate whether or not the repeated text needs to be changed, or whether it is still suitable for the current context.
Whether repetitions need to be checked depends on what the client requires. If the client says "we don't pay for repetitions", then you have no obligation to check the repetitions. But if a client doesn't specifically say that, then you are obligated to check every instance of every repetition. After all, the product that you deliver consists of all of the sentences, and not just the first instances of each sentence.
Added: sure, in some types of translations, a mere glance is sufficient evaluation.
[Edited at 2023-04-26 09:30 GMT]
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Lieven Malaise wrote:
Please understand that I translate on average the equivalent of 20000 new words per week, in a large variety of specializations.
Yes, now I understand.
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Lingua 5B
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Local time: 17:37
Member (2009)
English to Croatian
+ ...
Lieven Malaise wrote: Philip Lees wrote:
No work at all? Really? You mean you don't even check them? ...on what you understand by 'checking'. I always make sure that I 'see' them, so I can make a quick decision if the context is still the same or if there could be a reason to re-verify the segment thoroughly. But this is a very fast process (a bit like 'scrolling') that can hardly be desribed as 'spending time'.
What an overstatement. I don’t know about Dutch, but my language is quite dynamic, gender and case endings change a lot. You can have an X word in source 20 times, and its ending changed in my target at least 10 times out of those 20. So, yes, I have to take a close look at repetitions, but now I’m expected to take this close look for free thanks to MT and CAT grid politics.
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 17:37
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Samuel Murray wrote:
Added: sure, in some types of translations, a mere glance is sufficient evaluation.
In my experience a glance is always enough to know how a repetition is supposed to be handled. When I am translating I am always 'into' my text, so it is obvious what I should do: in 95 percent of the cases that means nothing at all.
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 17:37
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Lingua 5B wrote:
What an overstatement. I don’t know about Dutch, but my language is quite dynamic, gender and case endings change a lot. You can have an X word in source 20 times, and its ending changed in my target at least 10 times out of those 20. So, yes, I have to take a close look at repetitions, but now I’m expected to take this close look for free thanks to MT and CAT grid politics.
The 'X' I mentioned doesn't stand literally for one word, it can be a sentence of 30 words. But do you even use a CAT tool ? Then you should now that a 'repetition' is never an isolated word within a sentence, but a segment repetition and a segment can contain everything: from 1 word to 5 sentences in a row. So a repetition is a repeated segment, not the mulitple occurrences of 1 single word in different sentences. We might be talking about completely different things here.
Anyway, I have no knowledge of your language, but if in my language a complete sentence is repeated, then it is rather unlikely that you will have to change something if that exact same sentence is repeated further in your text (it might, depending on the context before the repeated sentence, but that would be easy to identify).
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 17:37
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
| Concept of a repetition | Apr 26, 2023 |
Philip Lees wrote:
If this is true for your language pair, then I think you are one of those who should be worried about being replaced by MT, as eventually the software will fill in every single segment as a 100% match, based on an enormous library of previously scanned vocabulary. It's possible this is already happening, and the agency doesn't even need to send you those jobs.
I repeat: 'X' isn't literally a word, it's a segment (mostly a complete sentence, sometimes more than one) within a CAT tool. You can't reduce 'repetitions' to single words, because that's not how it works. So I luckily don't have to worry at all about what you describe here.
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Lingua 5B
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Local time: 17:37
Member (2009)
English to Croatian
+ ...
| I don’t have many such texts | Apr 26, 2023 |
The whole chunks repeating is quite rare, even in technical texts. 95% would be more common than 100%, for instance. Don’t overlook the 5%, as a machine from the manual may explode.
A 30 word sentence repeating is quite rare. What would be more common is 25 words repeated, and the rest (5 words) changing gender and case endings heavily, possibly even the synonymity requiring a different form. So even if this is 90%, it requires a lot micro steps and micro thinking on my end.
... See more The whole chunks repeating is quite rare, even in technical texts. 95% would be more common than 100%, for instance. Don’t overlook the 5%, as a machine from the manual may explode.
A 30 word sentence repeating is quite rare. What would be more common is 25 words repeated, and the rest (5 words) changing gender and case endings heavily, possibly even the synonymity requiring a different form. So even if this is 90%, it requires a lot micro steps and micro thinking on my end.
Note: Brand names have case endings in my language.
[Edited at 2023-04-26 12:48 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 17:37
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Lingua 5B wrote:
Don’t overlook the 5%, as a machine from the manual may explode.
The whole thing about being a trustworthy professional translator is not to overlook things like this. Using technology doesn't mean you are allowed to not pay attention.
Lingua 5B wrote:
A 30 word sentence repeating is quite rare.
It's an example. I can be any length a sentence can have (segments can also be titles, bullet points...).
Lingua 5B wrote:
What would be more common is 25 words repeated, and the rest (5 words) changing gender and case endings heavily, possibly even the synonymity requiring a different form.
Then we talk about a 'fuzzy', not about a repetition. A repetition is 100% the same as a previously entered translation in the text you are translating. 'Fuzzies' obviously need to be thoroughly checked since the source text is not the same.
| | | | Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 17:37
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
| Depends on the language | Apr 26, 2023 |
Lieven Malaise wrote: Lingua 5B wrote:
What would be more common is 25 words repeated, and the rest (5 words) changing gender and case endings heavily, possibly even the synonymity requiring a different form. Then we talk about a 'fuzzy', not about a repetition.
No, a fuzzy match is a match in which the *source* text is different. A match in which the source text is identical is a repetition.
But this really depends on the language -- some languages are just luckier than others.
In my target language, for example, the word order of individual items in a list depends on the structure of the leading sentence. In English, it often doesn't. This means that you can have two lists of e.g. 10 items each, with identical source text except that the leading sentence is different, in the English, but that difference affects the word order of each of the individual items in the list, in the Afrikaans. There are many ways that this can happen, but one way is the position of the verb: in Afrikaans, the verb is often at the end of the sentence, whereas in English it is often at the start of the sentence (and thus often occurs in the leading sentence). This means that I have to add/replace the verb in each of the Afrikaans list items each time there is a new list, even though the English list items are identical each time (because they don't contain the verb). Another way in which this could happen is with active and passive voice -- in English, whether the leading sentence is in the active or passive voice often has no affect on the word order of the list items. This problem often occurs in the translation of market surveys.
Another example from my primary language combination, this time in medical texts: English doesn't have a polite and a familiar form of address, but Afrikaans does. This means that if a project contains documents for adults and similar documents for children, every sentence that uses "you" must be changed in the Afrikaans, even if the English text is otherwise identical. The issue with children vs adults also occurs when the English word for a health-related concept is the same regardless of whether you're speaking to a child or an adult, but in the Afrikaans the word used by children is different from the word used by adults. Identical source text, different translation.
Another example from my target language (in the opposite direction) is that while English often have different words for singular and plural, in some cases Afrikaans has just one word. Take "this" vs "these" or "it" vs "them" -- in all four cases the Afrikaans is just "dit". So it becomes important to check the repetition to ensure that the next instance of the sentence follows a sentence that relates to a singular or a plural, otherwise you end up with "these" and "them" used for singular things, and vice versa.
Another example: in Afrikaans, we often do not capitalize after a colon, but in English, capitalization is often used. So if the previous sentence ends on a colon or not will affect whether I need to use a uppercase or lowercase in the Afrikaans, even if the English sentences are identical.
[Edited at 2023-04-26 14:52 GMT]
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