Velior's Corporate Blog about Translation and Translation Industry

At some point in their career, many translation professionals had to exclaim, “Man, this seemingly short project is actually taking me forever! Why can’t I just bill by the hour instead of by the word?” Indeed, although a translation rate per word is an industry standard, it’s not always fair. One translation job may take longer than you expected based on the word count, as is often the case e.g. with translating marketing texts. Yet, another translation might be so easy that the client would’ve been better off paying by the hour. It’s a difficult dilemma, but I’ve recently come across a compelling article by Corinne McKay which, together with extensive reader comments, provides powerful insights on this problem and makes it easy to see the big picture. I just have a few additional comments:

From the clients’ perspective, the per-word rate for translation services is a very straightforward and practical pricing model. Many people and companies normally prefer to know the price upfront and may feel uncomfortable buying without knowing what to expect. For instance, I’m very frugal (at least that’s why I call it; my wife calls me a cheapskate) and the idea that a supplier will charge me based on how much time they spend seems unsettling to me at times. When I’m not sure about my supplier’s integrity or efficiency, I can’t trust that they will meet my cost expectations. Yes, I’ve worked with many outstanding suppliers who billed the exact amount of time that I expected or even less. But then, I also worked with people who billed way more than I could ever think of. This kind of misunderstanding may lead to frustration and even hard feelings for both sides of the deal. Because of this experience, as a buyer, I now want to be certain about the price upfront. The agreed-upon translation costs give clients that certainty while billing by the hour can cause unpleasant uncertainty.

The per-word rate is a powerful way to motivate translator financially. Imagine that you typically make $30 per hour by translating 300 words at $0.1 per word. If you resolve to earn more each hour, say $50, you have a clear pathway—increasing your efficiency will bring immediate results. In other words, with the per-word rate, there is a direct correlation between how efficient you are and your income. By contrast, with the translation rate per hour, you can’t earn more by improving performance. In fact, you earn more by working longer hours, that is less efficiently. Lack of financial motivation resulting from the per-hour rate can therefore backfire by causing a translator to be lazy and unwilling to grow professionally.

Calculating the amount of hours spent might also present a challenge. It’s easier for an in-house translator who can single-mindedly concentrate on a translation project. If they translate a 2,000-word project working from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., they simply log 8 hours. Fair and easy. But what about a freelance translator bogged down by many interruptions during the day such as clients’ emails or home environment distractions, just to name two? (Just as I was writing this, Jill Sommer published an exciting post on the subject of distractions faced by translators.) A freelance translator may take two days to translate the same 2,000 words, going back and forth between this task and other requests that come their way. To know the exact amount of time spent on the translation would require logging each small time block in a time sheet which is easier said than done.

To sum it up, at our translation agency, we prefer the per-word translator rate. Whenever we expect a translation project to take more time than stipulated by our basic per-word rate, we simply increase it upfront. And if a project takes less time than expected, we return the savings to our client in a form of a discount off a future project price or some other benefit.

You are also welcome to read the related materials below:

How Translation Price is Made Up

Translation Quote: Word Count or Page Count

Recently, we’ve received a comment from a reader asking how to enable Google Translate (GT) in OmegaT. This post answers their question in detail. It doesn’t imply, of course, that we rely on machine translation (MT) in our regular work for clients. Quite the contrary, we are raving fans of traditional translation and believe MT has a long way to go to before it’s usable beyond basic translation “just for understanding.” Neither does it mean that we use GT to translate documents subject to confidentiality agreements. This how-to is rather designed for those OmegaT users who need MT for very specific applications such as translating and post-editing huge amounts of Internet content. It might be also helpful for in-house translation departments interested in assessing whether MT has any promise for them.

Step 1. Configure Google Translate API

1. To use GT in OmegaT, you must enable Google Translate API in your Google account. If you don’t have one, visit this page to sign up.
2. Log in and go to Google apis.
3. Select Services tab and enable Translate API by clicking it.
4. Select API Access tab to generate your unique API key. The generated key will display on this page, e.g. 425gjkdkUofmfbbf41549841FRHBOAHF.
5. Select Billing tab and then Google Checkout.
6. Add a new payment method, that is your credit card details.
7. Check the terms of service checkbox and click Complete your purchase.
8. The Billing tab will confirm that billing is enabled.

Step 2. Modify OmegaT launch file

This instruction is based on Windows 7, but should be similar under other operating systems.

1. Open OmegaT installation folder. In my case, it is C:\Program Files (x86)\OmegaT.
2. Use a text editor to open the BAT file(s) you use to launch OmegaT. This is the recommended way to launch the program. If you don’t use it, you can’t benefit from a tokenizer, e.g. for English to Russian translation in my case. More information about configuring a BAT file is available here.
3. Modify the launch string by adding “-Dgoogle.api.key=your API key” before “OmegaT.jar.” In my case, the entire string looks as follows:

java -Xmx1024M -jar -Dgoogle.api.key=425gjkdkUofmfbbf41549841FRHBOAHF OmegaT.jar %* –ITokenizer=org.omegat.plugins.tokenizer.SnowballEnglishTokenizer

4. Save the file and double-click it to launch OmegaT.

Step 3. Configure OmegaT Settings

1. Select Options > Machine Translate.
2. Check Google Translate v2.

GT will charge you $20 per 1 million characters. You can check your usage under Google apis > Billing or Reports. You will be automatically charged at the end of each monthly billing cycle and receive an email notification.

Feel free to ask questions if you have any difficulty following this how-to.

Recently, I’ve been inspired by this article mentioned in ENLASO’s Twitter. ENLASO is a renowned localization and translation company, and the article in a local newspaper describes its organizational climate by way of a brief interview with Liesl Leary, Head of Corporate Marketing and Business Development. The main idea is how the company creates a win-win situation for itself and the employees by giving them more freedom in choosing when and where they work. The article inspired me because it resonates with my experience and vision we are pursuing at Velior. Here is a list of my comments to some of the ideas:

The employees are encouraged to work from home occasionally, so that they develop the appropriate skills and habits and can work remotely when necessary, e.g. during an emergency, to keep the company productive.

I have been selling this same idea to our team for years since working from home is really a win-win solution for everyone. Often, a team member needs to stay at home for a couple of hours or days, but can actually translate or manage projects during that time. This is when a remote connection to a work PC comes in handy. For instance, as a father, I have to be at home watching my son three or four times during the work week. By using a remote desktop, I can stay fully connected to whatever is happening at the office and make sure my internal clients don’t have to wait just because I’m not physically present.

The company is flexible about when employees take time off. It helps them to be innovative and generates loyalty.

Indeed, this kind of flexibility has a direct positive impact on creativity and sense of ownership. It’s hard to be innovative when you are straight-jacketed by rigid schedules, micromanagement, or endless meetings without clear outcomes. Less freedom of choice often translates into lower creativity or performance, in particular when translating marketing texts or editing translation. Just as ENLASO, we implement this common-sense principle by creating a climate and flexible rules to empower people to do their best instead of “go for this, go for that” type of delegation.

During slow times, ENLASO lets employees take very liberal vacations, so that the company can scale operations based on the workload.

We also tend to have a slow week or two during a year. I believe that given the project-based nature of our business, it’s a good idea to take time off not on specific days each week, but based on the current demand. Put simply, as a translation professional, you work when you have projects and you rest when you don’t. The most difficult thing about adopting this paradigm of thinking is that you commit to working also on weekends or after normal business hours. It’s quite against the traditional paradigm, but I think it’s becoming increasingly important in the current competitive landscape as clients demand faster turnarounds. The primary way to meet this demand is to increase your availability by adjusting your schedule to their needs. And it also makes sense financially since taking time off during a project and then sitting around at the office without any work to do is obviously a financial loss.

The employees can bring their pets to work. This forces them to go for a walk and be more productive later and also encourages conversations between those team members who don’t know each other very well.

This is another point that resonates with me deeply. Translators work mainly in front of a computer which results in repetitive stress to various parts of the body and can lead to disease such as deteriorating eyesight or back/neck disorders. Taking a break—whether it’s a walk after lunch or a workout—can make a huge difference in terms of preventing disease. And by making you feel refreshed both physically and emotionally, a short break indeed helps to boost productivity.

85% of ENLASO’s staff has been there for over three years. It’s a great result for a translation agency of ENLASO’s size. For Velior which is much smaller, it’s even 100 percent. Similar experience at two different levels suggests that empowering translation workforce clearly pays off.

To learn more about ENLASO and its translation services, please visit this page. For more information about Velior’s offering, you can browse our site.

Running any business involves a variety of balancing acts between different aspects of its operations. As perhaps with many other translation agencies, one of our major challenges is making sure we maintain top-notch quality while also nurturing customer relationships and meeting our financial goals. This balancing act can be represented as a conflict between three values: quality vs. customer service and bottom line. It’s mainly about deciding whether to accept an English to Russian translation project we are not completely comfortable with in terms of the subject matter. To resolve this conflict requires taking into account several considerations:

Quality

If we accept a project that we don’t have the expertise to translate, quality takes a hit.

Customer Service and Bottom Line

1. Rejecting the project, however, creates a headache for our clients, in particular those who rely on us heavily. If repeated often, it damages the relationship.

2. Without the required expertise, we are likely to take more time to understand and research the source text than reasonably expected. This extra time translates into either a financial loss for us or an increased rate for our client. Increasing the rate isn’t always fair because should the client contact someone who does have the expertise and can, therefore, handle the job more efficiently, the rate could be lower.

3. Rejecting the project can also have a negative impact on the financial performance. This is especially true with new clients. Acquiring a new customer requires an intensive investment of time and energy in marketing. But if we reject an order when the customer finally decides to place it, we end up losing both the profit and the marketing investment.

Resolving Conflict

Our team tends to resolve this conflict by making quality our priority. Although putting the other two values second in such cases is bad for business, we believe that it’s the quality of translation that makes the biggest difference in the long run. Our company wants to project an image of a highly professional and dependable vendor, delivering the highest quality that our clients have come to expect from us every single time. We love the feeling of pride that comes when an agency client entrusts us with translation of its own website or engages us to work on an especially important job for a new and promising account, and we wouldn’t trade it for anything.

We realize this policy does occasionally impact the level of customer service by causing inconvenience to our clients such as having to look for another vendor, extend the deadline, or pay a rate higher than expected. We work to minimize this inconvenience, but some clients do get understandably disappointed. Before you do so, though, we ask you to kindly consider the message of this post. It really boils down to one thing—we are thinking long-term and having your best interests at heart. The sustainable result will be your unbreakable trust in the quality of our work and integrity.

The free and open-source OmegaT is a powerful translation environment tool that individual translators and translation companies can use to boost quality and productivity of their daily work. One aspect of this tool particularly worth noting is the ongoing improvement process. The development team steadily brings out new versions, and now is time to look at another portion of enhancements introduced in version 2.5.1. As with our previous posts about OmegaT, I’ll review just those options that we already use for English to Russian translations on a day-to-day basis.

1. The latest release features a host of tag-related improvements. The primary enhancement is displaying tags in gray to visually separate them from the surrounding text—very similar to Wordfast Pro. This has been a long-awaited functionality because a plethora of tags in a segment makes it difficult to distinguish, and concentrate on, the translatable content. With gray tags, however, distinguishing the text is made easy. And it’s also much easier to avoid extra or missing spaces around tags so that the translation is free of double spaces or words glued together. The new feature doesn’t apply to the Fuzzy Matches pane, though, which still displays tags as regular text.

2. It’s now possible to remove all inline (displayed in the segment) tags from the entire source file by selecting Tools > Remove Tags. Removing tags makes sense when segments contain too many tags, in particular those that carry no meaning whatsoever. The problem of multiple tags is commonly associated with the DOCX files (Microsoft Word). As a workaround, we have been using CodeZapper to pre-process the DOCX files, but this new option offers an elegant way to handle them without resorting to an external solution. Be sure to use it carefully, though, because it also removes valid tags such as those representing bold words or hyperlinks. Currently, at least two applications come to mind:

(a) If your text contains many unnecessary tags, but little or no valid tags, you can remove the tags and translate without them. After finishing translation, you create the target document and compare it with the source document manually to check for any formatting missing due to deleted valid tags.

(b) If your text contains many unnecessary tags and quite a few valid tags, you can also choose to remove the tags. After finishing translation, you re-enable the tags. The segments with tags will appear untranslated. You then simply insert your translations, keeping out the unnecessary tags and adding just the valid tags.

3. Oftentimes, software localization projects involve files with Java-like tags such as placeholders, e.g. “{0} users like this.” OmegaT now makes working with these tags easier by handling them just as its own tags, that is displaying in gray and allowing to check them or insert with Ctrl+T. To use this option, select Options > Tag Validation and enable Check simple Java… You can even go beyond the standard tag pattern to define custom tags through regular expressions. For instance, in an ongoing project we do, many Java-like placeholders include one or more words. To process the entire placeholder as a tag, we can now create a regular expression. To do so, we will select Options > Tag Validation and enter a pattern in the Custom tag(s) regular expression field. Here is an example:

Segment before applying the custom pattern:

More \{0 [product name]\} reviews

A possible pattern to process \{0 [product name]\} as a tag is \\\{[^\r\n\}]*\}

Resulting segment:

More <tag> reviews

The new improvements make OmegaT an even more compelling choice for translation professionals. To download the latest version, please visit this page. Or you can download OmegaT 2.5.1 for Windows directly by clicking this link. And be sure to thank the developers for their valuable pro bono work by leaving a message in the project’s Yahoo group!

This is part 2 of this post. For part 1, please follow this link.

Thinking Translation Doesn’t Matter

Even if you agree with the above considerations, you might still believe that your product is so appealing that translation—whether good or bad—can neither add, nor decrease value. Or you may assume that your suite of marketing tools in the original language is so powerful that any quality of translation will do. Again, such approach might be appropriate with less important translations, but with customer-facing content, it can be disastrous. Imagine a user who looks at your product on a website and scratches their head, having hard time figuring out what the product’s features are from a sloppy translation next to it.

Below are two examples illustrating the paradigm of thinking I’m trying to challenge in this post—marketing, in particular when it comes to translation, is secondary to the product or service:

General Electric’s Acquisition

This is an example from Winning by GE’s legend, Jack Welch. It shows how overemphasizing your product and your own marketing strategy while completely dismissing other forms of marketing can lead to decreased sales. In 1988, GE acquired an engineering plastics business from BorgWarner. GE had an engineering plastics division of its own and sought to create cost synergy by selling BW products through GE’s distribution channel. What GE failed to recognize, however, was the difference in the marketing approach used by the two companies. The GE salespeople were accustomed to making a technical sale, convincing engineers to switch from metal to plastic. BW sold commodity-like products in the old-fashion way, relying on personal relationships and hefty expense accounts. GE decided it didn’t need this kind of marketing and let go 90% of BW’s sales force. As the assumption proved to be incorrect, GE saw its market share drop dramatically, and the acquisition never reached its full potential.

Russian to English Localization

This example illustrates how a sloppy translation turns away folks, in particular when written communications is how you primarily get your message across. This is what a Russian PC game publisher experienced after localizing into English a PC game that was a runaway hit in Russia. Although everything but the seemingly unimportant aspect—translation—was identical, the English version didn’t fare as well as the Russian one. Released in 2008, the English game received an average ranking of just 60% from the major game portals. Some of the end-user comments were:

• “This isn’t mana from heaven, it’s acid rain. There’s pain on every front. Badly translated English? Check. This isn’t just the odd typo and misused word; some of the dialogue makes very little sense full stop, and the storyline suffers as a result.”
• “It doesn’t cease to baffle me what went wrong when the developers hired a writer to write up the dialogue and the actors to deliver it… The text is filled with grammar errors and typos. The flow of the dialogue seems halting and the logical conclusions that the characters make based on the evidence they have are not well founded.”
• “… Endless badly written dialogues.”

Although the sales figures for this game are unavailable, it’s likely that with this kind of reception, the lost profits could easily outweigh the “savings” generated by buying cheap translation.

Summary

Whenever your translate any customer-facing materials, a simple rule to remember is that by saving on translation, you are likely to set your expansion up to fail, despite the great product or service. It doesn’t follow of course that a perfect translation guarantees success. But if your product fails in a foreign market, at least you won’t wonder whether you lost the entire investment due to saving inappropriately on what was just a fraction of the total expansion budget.