“la parole exportée”

I’ve just answered to a LinkedIn question. What a great way to start the day?

The question is here.

Here is my answer:

Some translators, and some of them not necessarily as bad as you might think, are lured into thinking that they will get more work by accepting these low rates. What they get is more stress, and less money to pay their bills. What will happen to them in an age of recession?

This kind of treatment goes beyond the problem of ensuring quality. If I was accepting these rates, for whatever reason, I would deliver the same quality as I would do for 10 times the amount. But it’s a matter of how you value yourself and your work in the world. For me, 0.02 cent per word is not pay, it’s slavery that tries to pass off for pay.

Editing machine-translated copy raises the same kind of problems. Some of the mistakes produced by translation software can be very subtle and require exactly the same level of proficiency and skills as if the translator was doing the job him/herself.

So you have my answer: I never accept, and indeed would never even consider looking at this kind of rate, and translators (I mean real, professional translators) are doing themselves a disservice by encouraging this practice and putting themselves on an equal level with machines.

Honestly!

A translator’s post I’ve just read strangely reminded me of an anecdote that happened to J., many years ago. J. was a fellow translator (who died before her time, sadly) who was much involved in literary translation, and she was asked to check the Spanish to French translation of an interview with one of the best Spanish writers. The French publisher was worried because the translation was visibly shorter than the original. J. set out to check it, and realized that the translator had summarized some parts of the interview. When challenged to explain why, the translator said she felt the author was being repetitive.

This illustrates the tight rope we translators have to walk. Even when we feel the source copy is badly written, our job is to provide a correct yet faithful rendering of it. God was not a translator, obviously.

I recently received a PO for a project from a multinational company with which I have a long-standing relation. In short, they respond to Request For Proposals that go through an extremely lengthy examination process, and if they are successful, the order for the translation is sent out, usually months after I’ve done the estimate.

The fact that the PO specified an unrealistic deadline was a sure sign that no deadline had been specified by the client, or the Indian BPO wouldn’t have entered something like tomorrow for a translation of 9,000 words… That didn’t sound like my client at all. Either they need it by a certain date, and they kindly ask me if I think I can do it by then, and of course I say Yes, or I have about 4 weeks to do it.

So I set off in order to get it out of the way. What experience has taught me, is to NEVER procrastinate on a project with an unspecified deadline, because you end up being… in a rush.

photo credit: gruntzooki

Then I realized that I needed some input from the client, so I sent out an e-mail and instantly received an automatic ‘Away on vacation’ response. I must admit that the temptation was sooooo great to drop the whole thing until closer to the date when my client would be back, even though the sensible half of me was telling me to just get on with it, as the required info could be taken care of at any time. I really toyed with the idea of shelving it, but about 6 hours later, the reply arrived around midnight. (Contrary to popular and unjustified belief, French employees can be officially on vacation AND work. Most of them don’t really have a choice.)

So, back to square one. No excuse to procrastinate, I must do this project now, not later…