What is the price for translation?

What is the price for translation? People often call to our translation agency to find that out.

From a user’s “external” point of view, obviously, the ideal translation would be utterly reliable, available immediately, and free. Like most ideals, this one is impossible. Nothing is utterly reliable, everything takes time, and there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

Even in a less than ideal world, however, one can still hope for the best possible realistic outcome: a translation that is reasonably reliable, delivered in good time before the deadline, and relatively inexpensive. Unfortunately, even these lowered expectations are often unreasonable, and trade-offs have to be considered:

• The closer one attempts to come to perfect reliability, the more the translation will cost and the longer it will take (two or three translators, each of whom checks the others’ work, will improve reliability and speed while adding cost and time).

• The shorter the time span allowed for the translation, the more it will cost and the harder it will be to guarantee reliability (one translator who puts aside all other work to do a job quickly will charge a rush fee, and in her rush and mounting exhaustion may make—and fail to catch—stupid mistakes; a group of translators will cost more, and may introduce terminological inconsistencies).

• The less one is willing to pay for a translation, the harder it will be to ensure reliability and to protect against costly delays (the only translators willing to work at a cut rate are non-professionals whose language, research, translation, and editing skills may be wholly inadequate to the job; a non-professional working alone may also take ill and not be able to tell another translator how to pick up where s/he left off, or may lack the professional discipline needed to set and maintain a pace that will ensure timely completion).

I wonder if anyone on the list has had an experience similar to mine. I work at a large company on a contract basis. I’ve been with them, off and on, for over 2.5 years now. At present, I work full-time, some part-time, and often—overtime. The work load is steady, and they see that the need in my services is constant. They refuse to hire me permanently, though.

Moreover, they often hire people who are engineers, bilingual, but without linguistic skills or translator credentials, or abilities. The management doesn’t seem to care about the quality of translation, even though they have had a chance to find out the difference between accurate translation and sloppy language, because it has cost them time and money to unravel some of the mistakes of those pseudo-translators. I know that I will be extraordinarily lucky if they ever decide to hire me on a permanent basis.

Ethically, I can’ t tell them that the work of other people is…hm… substandard. Most engineers with whom I have been working closely know what care I take to convey the material as accurately as possible, and how much more efficient the communication becomes when they have a good translator.
I also know that it is supposed to be a part of translator’ s job to educate his/her clients. I tried that…. <sigh.>
Rina

These real-world limitations on the user’s dream of instant reliable translation free of charge are the translator’s professional salvation. If users could get exactly what they wanted, they either would not need us or would be able to dictate the nature and cost of our labor without the  slightest consideration for our needs. Because we need to get paid for doing work that we enjoy, we must be willing to meet nontranslating users’ expectations wherever possible; butbecause those expectations can never be met perfectly, users must be willing to meet us halfway as well. Any user who wants a reliable translation will have to pay market rates for it and allow a reasonable time period for its completion; anyone who wants a reliable translation faster than that will have to pay above market rates. This is simple economics; and users understand economics. We provide an essential service; the products we create are crucial for the smooth functioning of the world economy, politics, the law, medicine, and so on; much as users may dream of bypassing the trade-offs of real-world translating, then, they remain dependent on what we do, and must adjust to the realities of that situation.

This is not to say that we are in charge, that we are in a position to dictate terms, or that we can ever afford to ignore users’ dreams and expectations. If users want to enhance reliability while increasing speed and decreasing cost, we had better be aware of those longings and plan for them. What it offers instead is a translator-oriented approach to the field, one that begins with what translators actually do and how they feel about doing it—without ever forgetting the realities of meeting users’ needs.