Tuesday, May 22, 2012

12 Quality is our priority

Quality is our priority
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12 comments:

  1. I spend extra unbillable time ensuring compliance with the style guide specified by client's editor on optional matters, only to have my translation returned full of changes that deviate from the style guide. So I spend even more unbillable time citing the pages of the style guide that had determined my original choices. Editor concedes and accepts my original version in its entirety. Sigh...

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  2. Wait... Pam's company actually pays for 100% matching?

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  3. Isn't it lovely when a client pays like 5% for 84%-99% matches and there are TONS of 98% matches that are nothing but machine translations with a 2% penalty that you HAVE to correct in their entirety?

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  4. Dear Mr. Moreno-Ramos,

    Please stop drawing cartoons or otherwise I will sue you for privacy violation. You have obviously installed video-cameras in my workplace, since all your cartoons are taken from true occurrences of my daily life.

    Yours truly,
    Moxine, the translator behind Mox

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  5. Even without Trados being taken into account (fortunately, none of my clients in Japan use it), there is nothing more annoying than having one's translation changed for the worse because there has to be consistency with previous (poor) translations....

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  6. I won't even talk with anyone who doesn't pay full price for everything I do, match or no match. I still have to read the darn thing and check the accuracy of the translation right? If I'm not paid 100% for the text, I ain't even lookin' at it. Can you imagine, walking up to a lawyer and saying, "hey, you do wills all the time, use your last one and I'll pay you for the changes." Not a chance. Then again, I can do that... but the point is that we ALL should do it. Non-salaried translators are shamefully exploited! :(

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    Replies
    1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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    2. Oh yes, indeed! But what's the point? We have been, are and shall be exploited. Any different opinion?

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  7. Isn't the reasoning behind the very low rates for 100% matches that, while translators won't read them (neither source nor target), in a traditional TM environment they still have to manually populate them into the translated document? Plus, translators may occasionally stumble over mistakes/inconsistencies or be asked to globally change a term, and rather than going back to the client and agreeing on the price for a specific change the low rate is supposed to cover for such additional effort.

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  8. This compliance issue is not just in translation. I used to work as a web developer in a large corporate. The legal blurb on the websites or promotions that we published was full of typos, or the syntax was misleading and often nonsense. Still, the Legal Dept was always right! And in the case of promos, they'd always send everything off to print before we'd know about the website to develop. So by the time I'd spot something, it was too late. "It's printed now so we can't change a dot. It has to be exactly the same. Please remove all your corrections and leave as was." *sigh*

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