Velior's Corporate Blog about Translation and Translation Industry

This post discusses translation challenges that involve words or phrases bearing a language-specific or culture-specific connotation, which cannot be easily rendered in the target text. Because a direct translation is undesirable or inappropriate, they require a more creative approach that considers context or audience. I will use examples (mainly from English to Russian translations) to generate a few ideas on how to approach some of this kind of challenges.

This city is not as huge as New York or even Los Angeles / Этот город не столь большой, как Москва или даже Санкт-Петербург

Here, both the challenge and the solution are simple. With the U.S. cities remaining in the translation, your comparison might not be immediately clear to your Russian-speaking audience. To avoid this, you can use similar Russian cities to get the message across.

SMART Goals / Цели SMART (Specific — конкретные, Measurable — измеримые, Attainable — достижимые, Realistic — реалистичные, Timely — с конкретным сроком)

This is a common word play challenge—acronym “SMART” has a dual meaning. In such cases, you can spend hours of time in search of a Russian equivalent to no avail. A more efficient option might be to keep the English acronym and translate each component in brackets. This way, the reader will be sure to understand the meaning of the acronym and might still enjoy the English word play. To make things easier, you can also provide a note explaining the nature of the word play.

Refer them to someone else who has the time—”No, but I’m sure Susan could help you with that“ / Учитесь направлять его к тому, кто располагает свободным временем: «Нет, но уверен, что в этом вам поможет Сьюзан»

Here, the choice whether to keep the English name, Susan, or replace it by a Russian name largely depends on context or audience.

It is important to consider the general feel of the text. In a text obviously coming from the English culture, a Russian name might feel alien. For this reason, in translations of fiction, the general tradition is to keep the proper names, even though they might be “eligible” for translation. For instance, one of the characters in Dombey and Son, Walter Gay (translation: Уолтер Гэй), is once humorously referred to as Walter Grave (Уолтер Грейв, not Уолтер Мрачный). This approach helps retain the original feel of the text. If you believe a translation will be also helpful, you can provide it as a note.

However, this approach isn’t universal. Where a text requires complete adaptation to the local audience needs, a direct translation might be more appropriate. Doing otherwise may signal that this text is a translation, causing your readers to smile or, even worse, frown, because this time it will be the English name that will feel alien.

In the above example taken from a training course designed for the Russian managers of a global company, I chose to keep the English name to retain the original cultural feel. Because the English language and culture are predominant in this company, the audience is likely to be okay with the English name.

A longer term strategy is to get a copy of The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, a simple guide to grammar / Более полезным в долгосрочной перспективе способом будет изучение книги The Elements of Style [...], которая представляет собой доступное руководство по грамматике. Эта книга предназначена для пишущих на английском языке; аналогичные руководства существуют и для русского языка

This sentence comes from a text about developing your writing skills. Although this text was originally written with English in mind, it also applies to Russian and can be translated successfully. This very sentence, however, refers to a guide that is specific to the English language. It is clearly of little use to the mainstream Russian-speaking audience. Moreover, it represents a risk of confusing the audience. You cannot simply omit the English title though, at least because some of the readers might still find it helpful (again, it is the question of understanding your audience). One method to handle such cases is to keep the English title in your translation, but add a note saying that this is an English-based guide, while similar Russian guides are also available. You can also go an extra mile by including the titles of such guides.

Der Kupplungsservo wandelt den [Pedalweg/pedalweg ] um… / Усилитель привода сцепления преобразует [Ход педали/ход педали]…

Included in a technical questionnaire (translated from German to Russian), this sentence offers a choice of two options in the square brackets. As you can see, the options are the same, save for the case. The difference is purely grammatical—the version with capitalization is the correct one, since the first letter of any German noun is capitalized. But how do you render the German grammatical nuance in Russian, which doesn’t require this type of capitalization? Originally, I couldn’t come up with a better solution than to simply keep the capitalization in translation. It is of course not quite meaningful, because the choice of options may seem ridiculous in Russian. I still think though that the question here is really not how to translate, but why translate at all—why translate into another language a question that is specifically intended to test the knowledge of German grammar?

I will be delighted to know how you approach this type of linguistic challenges in your translations. Please feel free to share what works for you and what doesn’t in similar situations.

P.S. It is also my pleasure to wish a happy New Year to all readers of this blog and our clients.

We are now in the middle of a long-term EN-RU translation project, which involves constant feedback from the client’s in-country reviewer, in the form of edited files. Among other things, the reviewer has a tendency to replace original Russian words by their equivalent English borrowings. Here are a few examples:

• Intranet (source) => интрасеть (our translation) => Интранет (edit)
• coach => наставник => коуч
• grade => разряд => грэйд

Or sometimes, they want to use English words in Russian translation directly:

• Promotable => Подходит для продвижения по службе => Promotable
• Well placed => На своем месте => Well placed

The reason why this happens is quite obvious: as an employee of a multinational company, this reviewer has a bilingual professional vocabulary. While this company employees in Russia are using Russian as their primary language in everyday work, various business activities involve active usage of English as well. These may include composing emails to affiliates in other countries, receiving instructions from higher management located outside of this affiliate, studying global policies, and so on. Through this type of repetitive activities, employees get accustomed to inserting English words in their Russian-based oral and written speech or thinking, whenever a direct Russian equivalent is unavailable or such equivalent is so clumsy that an English term appears more appropriate.

From a linguistic point of view, this is a natural process, because a speaker of any language looks for the most efficient way to convey their message. The downside of this process though is the negative impact it has on the target language in general, slowly depriving the latter of its uniqueness, making it more “globalized.”

Contrary to this project, some of the global companies are aware of this problem and take specific steps to reduce the negative effect. For example, Microsoft maintains a dedicated Russian language team, which is known for its commitment to finding the best equivalents that already exist in Russian instead of simply using borrowings. And their experience shows that a good equivalent can indeed be found in most cases. Some of my favorite translations include “брандмауэр” (firewall) and “веб-фрагмент” (web slice).

Personally, I prefer Microsoft’s policy of finding existing equivalents instead of coining new ones, because as a native speaker of Russian, I want my language to retain its unique feel. Still, I am convinced that, as end users of translation, clients are certainly in the position to choose whatever wording is preferred within their companies.

For more specific information about how Velior serves our clients, please see our case studies.

Tight deadlines are quite common in the translation industry. The reasons behind them certainly vary and are generally justified such as an urgent need for translation because a delivery truck is detained at the border due to an untranslated bill of lading. However, my experience with English to Russian translation suggests that deadlines sometimes might be unreasonably short. For instance, I can remember situations when we had just 2 days to translate about 6,000 words (while the industry average is arguably 2,000 words per day) and then waited for weeks before the typeset or reviewed files arrived. Another example is website localization: given the complexity of the process, especially when multiple languages are involved, it is a quite lengthy process. I occasionally check with the sites we translated recently to see whether our translation was made available correctly, and from what I have seen so far, the average time between translation delivery and publication is around three months. Meanwhile, the time provided for the translation step of the process is typically just a few days or weeks, i.e. disproportionately short. It is therefore our experience that reasonable deadlines are in fact possible in many cases, and in the final analysis, they are beneficial to both clients and translators. This post is intended to discuss some of the reasons in support of this belief.

1. For me, quality has always been the most important reason. Translation is not a pizza delivery that can be sped up by simply asking the delivery man to ride faster and straight to your home, skipping other clients en route. A translator can hardly shift into a higher gear without sacrificing quality. In particular, putting pressure on a translator to deliver faster than they normally would leads to incorrect understanding of the source text, less attention to detail, reduced editing and proofreading time, which all add up resulting in lower quality. If you want a high-quality translation, it might a good idea to let your translator establish a deadline they find reasonable to do a good job.
2. We normally add a certain percentage of time to each deadline to account for potential delay risks such as a translator getting sick, power outage, or hardware failure. Obviously, when such risk occurs while you are translating urgently (and therefore have no cushion of time), you are bound to miss the deadline. And no matter how pressing the deadline is, this will still damage your reputation. In other words, the risk of late delivery, hence reputation damage, is much higher with tight deadlines.
3. Velior is usually likely to provide discounts for jobs with longer deadlines as they increase our flexibility by enabling long-term planning and accepting other jobs within the same time frame. The results are reduced downtime and higher efficiency, which can be normally reflected in a discount to recognize and encourage the client’s flexibility.
4. As a company, we also need to develop new translation talent, including graduates and interns. Involving them in actual jobs at the translation step (of course such translations are subject to thorough editing) is an important part of their individual development plan. Tight deadlines greatly reduce such on-the-job training opportunities, as these translators need more time than the seasoned ones. This may hinder talent development to a certain extent, which in a long run may have a negative impact on the entire industry.

In addition to a reasonable deadline, a translation can also benefit from a higher price. You can read why in this post.

This is the 2nd part of the post. Part 1.

Reasons Not to Charge Full Rate

3. Translators who prefer full compensation also maintain that they invest a lot in translation memory software and related training to make it possible to process 100% matches and repetitions with less effort. Because of this personal investment, it is they who should reap the full benefit, not the client. As a translator myself, I think that they are correct to some degree, but the reality dictates otherwise:

• This logic could apply when the TM tools were just introduced to the market. Now, they are an inherent part of the translation industry. A translator is often forced to buy them to work on the specific types of jobs, because otherwise they will not be able to accept such jobs at all. It is not therefore a genuine investment in the sense that you put your own money into optimising your own work, but simply a mandatory requisite just like a PC or phone. Trying to keep all benefits of this software to yourself by labeling it as your investment means resisting progress in the industry where many peers and clients use it routinely. It is now a common technology, and, as such, its benefits should be shared by all parties to the translation process. For example, many clients put additional effort into writing consistently and should share the resulting savings as a compensation of this effort. (I understand though that some translators do, and will continue to, charge full rate for individual and completely justified reasons.)
• The clients become increasingly aware of both repetitions in their documents and the translation memory capabilities, therefore expecting discounts, as they do not see why they should pay the same price for identical text. And I find this fair, because it is a healthy consequence of the technological progress.

What if Client Prefers Not to Pay

1. Generally, Velior requests that 100% matches and repetitions be compensated. When a client asks to automatically process them without checking, there is often a risk of mistranslations, and we do not want any flaws in our translation, even if they happen through no fault of ours. For this reason, such requests are honoured on an exception basis only.
2. In these situations, we ask the client to extract the 100% matches and repetitions into a separate file, which includes only a single occurrence of each match/repetition. After the translation, the client can use this file to assemble a final translation. Again, there is always a high risk of mistranslations. Normally, such assembled translation should be proofread. Otherwise, the quality will likely decrease.
3. Translation agencies also use the “Perfect Match” technology to insert 100% matches only when the current context is identical to the context, in which they were originally translated. While this technology indeed brings client-side efficiency and cost-effectiveness, it often has drawbacks from a translator’s perspective. The translator normally needs to have control over the entire text, while this technology lets them work just on parts of the text. They do not see a “big picture” and also cannot change the existing translation (either because it is blocked, or they have little motivation to do so, as this work is not compensated). This reduces the translator’s efficiency and quality.

Notes

1. Generally, Velior does not provide discounts for any matches with the translation memory created by someone else, because we cannot be sure about the quality of those translations. They may contain errors that will reappear in the current translation and eventually become our responsibility. Such jobs are subject to negotiation on a case-by-case basis.
2. The match and repetition discounts do not apply to editing or proofreading, because these services are designed to check the entire text, hence matches and repetitions give little or no time savings.
3. Interestingly, our main language combination, English to Russian, yields much more repetitions than the Russian to English translation, which can be mainly attributed to more complex and diverse grammar and punctuation rules in the Russian language.

This post discusses Velior’s approach to charging for 100% matches against translation memory and internal repetitions. Generally, there are three opinions on this matter. Two of them are opposite: some believe that these matches and repetitions should be compensated fully just as any other words, while others maintain that no compensation is necessary, since processing these words does not require any specific effort. The third opinion, shared by Velior, is neutral: a reduced rate should apply to these words.

Reasons to Charge for 100% Matches and Repetitions

1. The context where a 100% match or repetition occurs may be different from the context of the original translation. It is therefore important to check whether all such words fit the new context. The time spent on checking should be compensated. Processing 100% matches and repetitions without compensation and hence without checking is justified only when the client is absolutely positive that the context is always identical, e.g. in a data sheet or parts catalogue. However, in our experience, such texts are rather the exception than the rule: they account for about 3% of our workload (translation from Russian to English, English to Russian, German to Russian).
2. 100% matches and repetitions often require the same amount of typesetting work as any other words. Even when 90% of your text are repetitions, you might end up spending just as much time on formatting them as if they all were new words. And unless this type of work is compensated separately, it should be included into the repetition rate.

Reasons Not to Charge Full Rate

1. Because the amount of work associated with 100% matches and repetitions is normally reduced as compared to the new words, it does not make business sense to charge full rate for them. You do not have to translate them from scratch, but just check whether the previous translation fits the new context, and it usually does. Truth be told, sometimes such words do require adjustment or even complete re-translation. For instance, an English to Russian translator may render the word “position” as “должность” when it means job position. This translation however will be of no use as a 100% match in the context where “position” means simply location and should be translated as “положение.” Yet, as I mentioned above, this happens to a very low percentage of 100% matches and repetitions, and a discount is therefore completely justified.
2. Translators who prefer full compensation for 100% matches and repetitions often refer to various examples from other industries to explain that a discount for repetitive work is unnatural. For instance, in the construction industry, you will not push the construction crew, which is building your new home, for a discount on the basis that one room is an exact match of the other. While this idea might have some truth to it theoretically, in real life, it is the actual amount of work/time/effort associated with the repetitive task that is important here. The new room might be indeed identical, but the amount of work required to finish it will still be the same. In contrast, the amount of work associated with 100% matches and repetitions is usually much lower as compared to the full-rate new words. Normally, the translation memory software inserts them automatically, and you only check whether the previous translation fits the new context. It is therefore fair to charge a reduced rate reflecting the actual time spent on checking instead of charging the full rate as if these words required the same amount of effort as the new ones.

This post is continued here.