| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4] > | Be paid nearly nothing for your work. Apply Here! Thread poster: Andre Ferreira
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| I never understand this argument | Feb 11, 2014 |
Gabriela Gavrilova-Widua wrote:
I only want to stress the fact, that the living expenses in the different countries of residence of translators can diverge widely. I think Recep can confirm this fact as a native Turk...
In my opinion this is the main obstacle for establishing prices which are acceptable in let say London as well as in Bolivia...
Gabriela, can you please explain this to me? If we ALL agreed on an acceptable rate, e.g. USD 0.10 per word or whatever and ALL insisted on this rate for good-quality, professional work, why would this pose a problem for those who live in places like Bolivia?
Surely the only result would be that translators in these countries would be quite well off? While those in London could earn a decent living wage without being undercut
[Edited at 2014-02-11 19:42 GMT]
| | | | Giles Watson 
Italy
Local time: 07:23
Italian to English
In memoriam | Price-rigging and sawdust-plaiting | Feb 11, 2014 |
KateKaminski wrote:
Gabriela, can you please explain this to me? Is we ALL agreed on an acceptable rate, e.g. USD 0.10 per word or whatever and ALL insisted on this rate for good-quality, professional work, why would this pose a problem for those who live in places like Bolivia?
1) It may not pose much of a problem for translators in Bolivia (I wouldn't be too sure, though) but it certainly would for those of us who are tax-resident in economies where price-rigging is outlawed.
2) Have you ever tried to get translators to agree on anything? Happy sawdust-plaiting!
| | | | Andre Ferreira
China
Local time: 13:23
English to Portuguese
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | Many replies | Feb 12, 2014 |
Many replies while I was out on my GMT+8 zone, good to see different opinions.
However my point is not that we should have agreed between us translators an unified rate, but based on the average rate translators are displaying for each language, be created a minimum which will not allow some ads to be published in the first place.
About London and Bolivia...I think that even if obviously rates will diverge depending on many factors as where the translator live, experien... See more Many replies while I was out on my GMT+8 zone, good to see different opinions.
However my point is not that we should have agreed between us translators an unified rate, but based on the average rate translators are displaying for each language, be created a minimum which will not allow some ads to be published in the first place.
About London and Bolivia...I think that even if obviously rates will diverge depending on many factors as where the translator live, experience, the project itself, the deadline, etc, outsources should be more respectful with translators and not offer super low payments. Besides that, in my opinion, really shouldn't matter much where you live (including UK and Bolivia, London and La Paz) but the quality of your work itself. For example I live in China, where translation agencies pay very very little, however very few of my clients are Chinese companies. Today, independent of where the translator is living, if the person has access to the internet (and then can use this website), will also be able to be paid similar rates than people living in the Londons of the world.
Other point is that while we all obviously do not know which where the rates translators offered for the job which ended up with 185 quotes (last time I saw), in my opinion translators would adapt their quotes to the reality of the job, while such ads shouldn't be even there in the first place.
About my Ferrari allegory, yes, I think we provide an important, classy service, which sometimes needs high speed and which should be respected and paid what it's worth. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Andre Ferreira
China
Local time: 13:23
English to Portuguese
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | very much agreed Kate | Feb 12, 2014 |
KateKaminski wrote: Gabriela Gavrilova-Widua wrote:
I only want to stress the fact, that the living expenses in the different countries of residence of translators can diverge widely. I think Recep can confirm this fact as a native Turk...
In my opinion this is the main obstacle for establishing prices which are acceptable in let say London as well as in Bolivia...
Gabriela, can you please explain this to me? If we ALL agreed on an acceptable rate, e.g. USD 0.10 per word or whatever and ALL insisted on this rate for good-quality, professional work, why would this pose a problem for those who live in places like Bolivia? Surely the only result would be that translators in these countries would be quite well off? While those in London could earn a decent living wage without being undercut [Edited at 2014-02-11 19:42 GMT]
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Giles Watson
Italy
Local time: 07:23
Italian to English
In memoriam
Instead of attempting to force others to charge more (how democratic is that?), wouldn't it be simpler to emulate translators who have customers clamouring to pay top dollar?
If you concentrate on the bottom feeders, you'll end up thinking like them.
| | | | Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 07:23
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Andre Ferreira wrote:
The one which bothers me the most, are companies offering payments below, and VERY below market prices. They not only offer low payments but translators are accepting them.
I think both the translator that accepts the job and the client that pays for that kind of a job will learn very quickly that this sort of thing is not sustainable. People who want to be translators often don't realise how much is fair to charge, and people who have never hired a translator often don't realise how much is fair to pay. There is greater danger in sites that push the rates down ever so slightly (which sustains them) than in sites that offer such ridiculous rates that are not sustainable at all.
...when people feel is OK to be paid nearly nothing for a slowly built competency, I feel is very disrespectful.
It has to do with knowledge, not respect. People who are not regular translation buyers don't realise how expensive translation is, and people who haven't done a lot of translation yet don't realise how much effort it is to create a translation (even a poor translation).
What is your opinion on this? What could be done and/or suggested to ProZ?
I don't think you can do anything about it. But... I do think you can make use of these services, by simply telling those potential clients what your usual rate is and why your rate is so high. Some clients, once they understand what translation is and how it should be paid, will pay better rates and become good clients. Don't forego this opportunity simply because the client is ignorant at the start.
| | | | | They often get more than they deserve | Feb 12, 2014 |
Recep Kurt wrote:
This is because anybody can register here and pretend to be a translator.
A student in pursuit of some pocket money; a retired professional filling his/her time and making some extra money... There is nothing preventing them from being "translators". I think whoever posts such jobs is clearly not after quality, so I wouldn't worry about it. Let them get what they deserve.
I believe a lot of unprofessional outsourcers often get more than they deserve for what they pay for the project As long as there are quite a few newcomers with good skills who want to break into the profession believing they need to accept such jobs in hopes of getting more or even better work later, certain outsourcers will take advantage of that and projects will be taken away from the community of professionals. I wouldn't just assume that these outsourcers are going to be happy with poor quality.
I am not as worried about "pretenders" who will fall flat on their stomach and embarrass the outsourcer and themselves as I am about those translators with skills who take on very cheap jobs. Granted, the example the poster mentioned is so ridiculous that I can't imagine even a newcomer taking it, but there are other examples of projects that pay more but are still compensated inadequately.
Everyone has to decide for himself or herself what they do and what kind of payment they accept, but I can’t recommend supporting shady enterprises with shady payment terms. That's no way to make a career. If you like doing things for free or cheap, you are taking jobs away from the professionals who depend on as many adequately paid projects as possible. Can I stop that? No. However, I believe that it's not the committed part-timers or retirees (from other jobs) who accept the majority of these jobs and are hurting the business. As you said, they don't depend on it, and I am sure most of them also know what their work is worth. I believe it's people who don't know any better and take on any work because they figure it's better to have something than nothing. But that's no way to work under decent conditions (way too much time worked for not enough money). I must always ask myself: what do I get out of the project in terms of money and/or reputation and/or better future opportunities. If it's not enough, I can't accept it. It would be exploitation and I couldn't sustain myself financially.
I also theorize that eventually, once this spiral of ever lower-paid projects has spun its course or it all has crashed, we could see a renewal of the profession. But one shouldn't hold his/her breath and wait for that to happen.
When you give what you're worth (and a professional always will), you should get (paid) what you're worth. Otherwise, the two sides of the equation don't square and the scale will dip and you will fall off.
I think one of the most important ethical standards we as translators must uphold is that we won't be exploited, that we only work for decent rates. You either are a professional translator or if you can't make a living that way, I would suggest doing something else.
Making yourself dependent on low-paying jobs is no way to live and doesn't help our sector or any of its participants.
Unprofessional behavior will never pay off.
Just don't do it!
B
[Edited at 2014-02-12 19:15 GMT]
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Louisa Fox wrote:
You don't have to quote at the prices stated in the post.
I believe some people quote at their normal rate in order to try and educate outsourcers.
You have no way of knowing if those 70 quotes were all for the rate the oursourcer offered.
Try it out Louisa and see what happens.
There called "bids" that's why the lowest bidder will win.
And most jobs posted are always very low-paying jobs. And they keep being posted. You do the math.
B
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| Don't subscribe to that argument either | Feb 12, 2014 |
KateKaminski wrote: Gabriela Gavrilova-Widua wrote:
I only want to stress the fact, that the living expenses in the different countries of residence of translators can diverge widely. I think Recep can confirm this fact as a native Turk...
In my opinion this is the main obstacle for establishing prices which are acceptable in let say London as well as in Bolivia...
Gabriela, can you please explain this to me? If we ALL agreed on an acceptable rate, e.g. USD 0.10 per word or whatever and ALL insisted on this rate for good-quality, professional work, why would this pose a problem for those who live in places like Bolivia? Surely the only result would be that translators in these countries would be quite well off? While those in London could earn a decent living wage without being undercut [Edited at 2014-02-11 19:42 GMT]
You live where you live and you need to make a certain amount of money.
I live in the United States, and my working languages are English and German. So, my rates are accordingly. If you rather have the job done by someone in another country X for USD 0.03/word, then go ahead. Can I stop it? No. Do I like it? No.
But a German-English translator in the US must charge a certain amount of money for his/her work to make a decent living or he/she needs to find something else.
That's just the way it is.
I don't worry too much about establishing prices/having globally established minimum prices which are acceptable in let's say New York/London as well as in China/Bolivia etc.
That's not going to happen very soon. I am more concerned about reaching clients in the US/Canada and in German-speaking countries who appreciate the experience they get from someone like me in the country I live in and the country I grew up in etc.
If you rather use the services of a German native speaker translator who now lives in China who does English>German translations, so be it. You won't find too many of those and if so, they probably expect much more than USD 0.03/word.
Just don't be a German>English or English>German translator in the US or Germany (example), working for a translation agency that is based in a low-paying country (or for an unprofessional agency anywhere on the planet) and accept USD 0.03/word as the rate for which you provide your service. That's not the way to do it. You won't do that very long. But there seem to be plenty of other people making the same mistakes over and over again.
B
[Edited at 2014-02-13 05:16 GMT]
| | | | Oleg Rudavin
Ukraine
Local time: 08:23
Member (2003)
English to Ukrainian
+ ...
| Market segmentation | Feb 13, 2014 |
Bernhard Sulzer wrote:
...eventually, once this spiral of ever lower-paid projects has spun its course or it all has crashed, we could see a renewal of the profession.
The total renewal is unlikely. It rarely happens at all: good professionals will be OK in any trade while those that can be described as working in the mass production sectors will be offered subsistence level rates.
More likely is the market segmentation (obvious even now) into jobs that fall into "premium", "quality" (or whatever you call it) category - and the rest. The "premium" segment will include 1) translations that come with important products or services (law, medicine, certain tech translations - health, life, assets or money at stake), and 2) texts with really important information (e.g. some research papers).
[Edited at 2014-02-13 20:00 GMT]
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Oleg Rudavin wrote: Bernhard Sulzer wrote:
...eventually, once this spiral of ever lower-paid projects has spun its course or it all has crashed, we could see a renewal of the profession. The total renewal is unlikely. It rarely happens at all: good professionals will be OK in any trade while those that can be described as working in the mass production sectors will be offered subsustence level rates.
Although I agree that true professionals have a better chance of attracting better clientele and that it helps to work in certain niche markets, the fact remains that the surge of translation agencies and translators on the internet has certainly damaged the market. We all know how many translation projects are offered daily here for example at what prices and are then accepted and carried out by whoever wins the bid. The problem is systemic and unprofessional practices certainly have repercussions for all of us.
B
| | | | Oleg Rudavin
Ukraine
Local time: 08:23
Member (2003)
English to Ukrainian
+ ...
| I'm talking about the future | Feb 13, 2014 |
Bernhard Sulzer wrote: too simple
You are talking about the reasons, Bernhard, and I'm trying to look ahead.
We've seen it since the start of the industrialization era: when the demand exceeds a certain level, mass production starts, and consumers of mass products don't care what education we got, how we appreciate what we do or how important we think our work is.
Only translator that are hard to replace can easily keep (and increase) their rates.
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| Translating is not mass production | Feb 13, 2014 |
Oleg Rudavin wrote: Bernhard Sulzer wrote: too simple You are talking about the reasons, Bernhard, and I'm trying to look ahead. We've seen it since the start of the industrialization era: when the demand exceeds a certain level, mass production starts, and consumers of mass products don't care what education we got, how we appreciate what we do or how important we think our work is. Only translator that are hard to replace can easily keep (and increase) their rates.
Hi Oleg. Thanks for the dialogue.
Translations are not produced by machines with a little bit of human supervision or by humans/robots performing very repetitive work. And they are not "standardized" products - you're not sending out the same translation thousands of times. Our work is a craft. We are all very invested in a very creative process, more or/than less and we can't rely on repetitive thought or even finger processes (we don't type the same words over and over again) as in your typical mass production environment.
In short, I can't subscribe to the mass production argument. Just because certain outsourcers think it to be mass production doesn't make it mass production. Yet, if translators accept inadequate rates = cheaper rates, it would seem they buy into such a concept that says mass-produced "products" can/must be produced cheaper. Even if we all worked for USD 0.01/word, it's not because translations are mass-produced. It's because translators think they have to take any job that they can get. That's a very desperate attitude.
Mass production cannot simply be defined by"the product is produced a lot/very often", if you will.
Mass production as I see it is decisively repetitive work and even involves decisively repeated thought processes/repetitive thinking. And in the case of mass production, to give an example, the same car model is produced again and again, identical down to the last screw.
In my opinion, no market segment or niche in the translation industry is safe from the kind of price erosion seen in general over the last 15 years. If what you say is true, I imagine more and more translators (especially the good ones) will want to try/educate themselves in these especially good niches/fields and the competition will become just as fierce.
I believe it is the quality that sets a professional apart, no matter in which fields he or she works. And as I argued before, if one provides "quality" based on skills, education and experience, it ought to pay off and pay the bills or it's not going to be worth it.
If all professionals follow that mantra and still won't get enough work because they charge "so much" compared to other people in the industry, the good ones will leave the industry and the quality of translation in general will suffer because only the uneducated people will stay.
That would eventually surely bottom out. My thoughts.
I sure wish more people would care to join the discussion.
B
[Edited at 2014-02-13 22:18 GMT]
| | | | | I generally agree with Bernhard | Feb 13, 2014 |
The question to me is whether or not the industry will actually bottom out and then begin a recovery process before someone develops an A.I. system that is capable of taking machine translation to a level where all but a few translators become obselete. It's really conceivable that this could happen sometime this century - not so much a question of 'if', but rather 'when'. And once that happens, the translation industry as we (humans) know it is for all intents and purposes over.
| | | | Giles Watson
Italy
Local time: 07:23
Italian to English
In memoriam | MT (monkey translation) | Feb 14, 2014 |
Bernhard Sulzer wrote:
I believe it is the quality that sets a professional apart, no matter in which fields he or she works. And as I argued before, if one provides "quality" based on skills, education and experience, it ought to pay off and pay the bills or it's not going to be worth it.
If all professionals follow that mantra and still won't get enough work because they charge "so much" compared to other people in the industry, the good ones will leave the industry and the quality of translation in general will suffer because only the uneducated people will stay.
That would eventually surely bottom out. My thoughts.
I sure wish more people would care to join the discussion.
[Edited at 2014-02-13 22:18 GMT]
But in a market, downswings are followed by upswings, or crashes, or booms, or periods of stagnation. There is - literally - no end to this discussion.
If all the customers want any old translation yesterday in preference to wonderfully written wordsmithery the day after tomorrow, the wordsmiths are not delivering quality in the customers' terms.
Currently MT, Google Translates and the like are educating customers, who have always been sceptical of the need to pay anything at all for translations, to expect unpublishable instant versions for free. Their entirely human reaction is to hold onto the "instant" and the "for free" while seeking ways to improve quality.
To be honest, I'm surprised MT hasn't come along much much faster than it has. The underlying approach seems to be to regard computing power as an infinite number of monkeys, in the Douglas Adams sense of the primates who, given enough typewriters, will eventually reproduce the works of Shakespeare. Programmers factor in all sorts of algorithms to organise the shifts, allocate the monkeys to workgroups or tweak the number of keys on the typewriters but so far the output has remained palpably simian.
Since the days of Homer the whole point of composition has been to engage your audience so you can communicate a message and MT, which I tend to think of as standing for "monkey translation", doesn't do style, engaging or otherwise.
Obviously you can also teach your monkeys with input from flesh-and-bone translators to create expert systems, which can work in very controlled environments. Is it worth setting up such systems when there are so many cheap-as-chips "translators" who say they can do the job just as well?
Not yet, evidently.
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