Beware of “bastard translations” | Dec 5, 2023 |
I’ve been entrusted with LQAE for a long time with the same outsourcer for several outstanding corporate customers, and we went through some surprising events of firms providing us with documents that they handed over as “translations”. As time went by, that awkward situation became a regular one with different important international firms. The original deal, however, was the following: if the changes represented less than one-third of the total words, the rate was 1/3 of the normal... See more I’ve been entrusted with LQAE for a long time with the same outsourcer for several outstanding corporate customers, and we went through some surprising events of firms providing us with documents that they handed over as “translations”. As time went by, that awkward situation became a regular one with different important international firms. The original deal, however, was the following: if the changes represented less than one-third of the total words, the rate was 1/3 of the normal rate; if the changes represented more than one-third and less than half of the total words, the rate was 1/2 of the normal rate, and if the changes represented more than half of the total words, the rate was 2/3 of the normal rate. In practice, such a situation was initially fair for the three parties involved, i.e., the customer, the outsourcer, and me. As machine translation became more regularly used, we have come upon some awkward cases where it was crystal clear that the documents to be LQAEed were simply processed with some translation software with no human intervention whatsoever, which eventually led me to call these projects “bastard translations” since they were only created with a simple click. I had some cases where my suggestion was to charge 100% of the normal rate, which was seldom approved, and the most common scenario in such unfortunate situations was to get 90% of the common rate. Moreover, such projects usually have restrained TATs, and cumbersome projects naturally require more time, which brings about additional conflicts. A similar situation happened with MTPE. Outsources often say these projects have good quality but you never know for sure what you are going to receive. Therefore, dear friends of mine, my humble suggestion is certainly to offer an hourly rate both for LQAE and MTPE, which being honestly seen by all three parties, happens to be the only fair situation. Well, that’s it. Best regards! JJ ▲ Collapse | |