Velior's Corporate Blog about Translation and Translation Industry

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.

This post resulted from an internal discussion of a highly-priced quote for a Russian to English website translation. In the course of preparing the quote, I suggested to charge our highest rate while our project manager maintained that this didn’t make sense because the client would never agree. I knew it was likely to be true, but still wouldn’t budge. To sell him on my point of view, I emphasized two considerations. First, since the website was designed to sell a product, we had to deliver high-quality English translation. Second, to be able to do that, we needed to charge our highest rate. In fact, anything less than our best job could turn away at least some of this prospect’s potential clientele, preventing them from realizing the full potential of the investment in translation.

Now, why was the prospect unlikely to accept the quote? Most clients generally want to receive an excellent translation that will provide a high return on investment. But when it comes to decision-making, many focus primarily on the price tag instead of quality, thus reducing the likelihood of achieving the intended result. So, my goal for this longer post is to explain why it might be beneficial to appreciate translation as what it often is—a marketing investment or instrument—and invest wisely.

Approaching Translation from Marketing Perspective

One common purpose of buying translation for many companies is to expand into new countries to tap the revenue potential there. When faced with a vendor choice, they have a plethora of options. The translation rates vary widely—from those offered by the hobby translators to seemingly sky-high rates of the industry veterans—making the sourcing process a challenge. What is the right choice for you? The first step is to understand what it is that you exactly expect from this translation. For those translations that are unlikely to affect your business, it might be indeed appropriate to sacrifice quality for cost. But whenever you translate any customer-facing materials, it makes sense to recognize translation as a marketing expense; that is, an investment that your future earnings rely upon. When you come from that place, you perceive translation not as an overhead or commodity, but rather something of value that your success hinges on.

Saving Pennies while Losing Thousands

Even if you see translation primarily as a marketing tool, a high translation rate might still give you a sticker shock, especially when you think that it’ll be easy to translate your materials. Let’s take a look at it at a different angle though. How much does providing your potential clients with a poor translation cost you in terms of lost profits? A badly translated company brochure or business proposal can make it difficult for your prospects to understand your message, severely reducing your chances of winning their business. A poor translation is really a potential bottleneck to your expansion which can render other efforts and advantages meaningless. You might have the best product in the world accompanied by a great marketing strategy, but a vague or ridiculous translation can nonetheless lay the foundation for failure.

This post is continued in part 2.

The “quality triangle” is a very basic, yet powerful way to describe the relationships between the three main dimensions of translation services: quality, time, and price. What it means is that something always has to give. That is, whenever you overemphasize one of the dimensions, the triangle loses equilibrium and two other dimensions suffer. I think this triangle concept perfectly applies to our services, and this post provides recommendations for those clients who wish to receive a perfectly balanced service. The insights I’m offering are general observations, i.e. they don’t apply in every situation. For example, a lower rate doesn’t necessarily lead to lower quality, and so on. The key message is, however, that it’s more likely to do so than not.

Overemphasizing translation quality: Higher quality of work requires investing more time in various types of quality-related activities such as editing by a second linguist, asking your client to clarify ambiguous phrases, checking terminology consistency, or automatic quality assurance check. Among these activities, editing is probably the most time-intensive process because it involves a rigorous, time-consuming check by another person. While editing itself significantly increases the turnaround time, managing this process between several team members also adds transition time. So, whenever you put quality first, you can expect a longer deadline. And since more energy and resources are typically necessary for producing a higher quality translation, your translation provider is also likely to expect a higher price. For example, let’s assume a company like ours produces 500 words of English to Russian translation per hour, thereby making $50 per hour. If a client requests a top-notch quality translation, e.g. for a business proposal, the productivity may drop by as much as 50 percent. The team will then want to double the rate per word, or else it will make just $25 per hour.

Overemphasizing urgency: The quality of work suffers under tight deadlines as less time is available for the quality-oriented activities. Moreover, if things go sideways (and by Murphy’s law, they often do), but the project schedule is so straight-jacketed that every minute counts, quality may drop in an order of magnitude because working under pressure is a major source of error. To avoid or at least minimize the negative impact, a translation team may offer to work overtime so that it literally creates additional time required to do a good job. While the overtime does help to ensure an appropriate level of quality, it may also wreak havoc in the team’s short-term schedule and usually forces folks to work beyond standard hours or on weekends. This additional effort is compensated by a higher price, usually in a form of a surcharge to the standard rate such as 50% or 100%.

Overemphasizing cost: I think this is the worst-case scenario where quality typically takes the biggest hit because by imposing a lower rate may discourage a vendor from doing their best job. One common reason for requesting a price reduction is a volume discount. Although volume is indeed a legitimate basis for a discount under certain circumstances, such discount isn’t quite as clear-cut as e.g. a wholesale discount. In fact, volume doesn’t always translate into time savings that could justify any discount. A team facing this kind of situation may want to avoid financial loss by increasing productivity. And with translation, higher productivity very often results in lower quality, up to what I believe to be an apocalyptic scenario—involving a less competent translator and/or eliminating the independent review step. By the same token, the deadline may suffer because the team is likely to have better-paying jobs in the pipeline and may, therefore, put your project on the back burner until capacity for low-margin work is available.

For more information about Velior’s translation services designed to strike a balance between the three dimensions, please see this page.

We are continually receiving requests from peer Russian translation agencies to subcontract work to us. While such indirect peer recognition is flattering, it usually doesn’t result in any relationship. The roadblock is our rates being the same or higher than the rates of an inquiring agency. Subcontracting work at such rates rarely makes business sense unless an agency wins a very huge translation project and, being unable to handle it all by itself, needs to outsource a portion to a trusted partner. The agency chooses to do so just for the sake of being able to take up the whole project, even if doing so brings no profit. Otherwise, it might lose the project altogether or fail to complete it on schedule.

Because such requests are a form of peer recognition, in the past, we would get so excited about them that we would rush into the relationship, without even thinking about the rates. Later, we would discover that the rates an agency expected us to work for were actually prohibitive. You can read about this kind of frustrating experience in an older post. Now, however, we are overriding the initial excitement with the understanding that this request is unlikely to result in any business. So, the first thing we now do is communicating our rates, which immediately acts as a brake on a potential relationship.

It seems that the common assumption is that provincial translation companies like ours have generally lower rates than Moscow-based agencies. Indeed, there is a common sense rationale behind this assumption, because operating an agency in Moscow might be more expensive due to higher cost of living and doing business. But the geographical location has never been a consideration in setting our rates. It is my opinion that most translation vendors are in fact competing with all other vendors on a global market enabled by Internet. This increasingly virtual market doesn’t really care where you are located physically. It is your competitive edge that determines your rates.

Personally, I think working with Russian translation agencies is an extremely remote possibility for us. Just as with most other Eastern European agencies, a major piece of their business comes from agencies in the U.S. and Western Europe, simply because this is where most clients are. As a subcontractor to another agency, a Russian agency is expected to charge less than it would charge to the same client if it worked with this client directly. This is perfectly normal, but my point is simply that many Eastern European agencies, including Russian, are likely to be turned away by our rates since their rates are relatively low in the first place.

Finally, here is the link to our current rates. I strongly encourage you to save time and energy by checking these rates before contacting us with a subcontracting offer. By the way, in January 2012, we slightly increased the rates, mainly because of adjustment for inflation, as well as our continued efforts to improve the quality of our work and be in the top 5% of English to Russian translation providers.

We love to work with direct clients based in our city, Ivanovo. This happens rarely though, because we can’t handle most requests we receive. I would like to use this post to describe these types of requests. If you are a potential client, I hope this post will save you time if you are considering enlisting our services for such a request. There are two general types of requests that we don’t handle:

1. Translation of personal documents such as passports, marriage licenses, or death certificates.

Such translations normally require certification by a notary public, which we don’t offer. It is my experience that the local notaries who provide this service prefer to work with translators they know. For this reason, we refer such requests to the offices of the notaries or other local translation companies who specialize in this kind of services.

Also, many language combinations involved in such requests are rare and are completely outside of our area of expertise (English to Russian translation). We don’t have an established working relationship with translators of such combinations, which is essential in our line of business: you need to work with a translator on a regular basis to be sure that they are dependable and will continue to match your quality expectations.

Perhaps, the only exception we make with this type of requests is medical records. They do fall within our area of expertise, and we are quite comfortable handling them thanks to years of experience with medical translations.

2. The second type of requests is the translations required for information purposes, rather than publication purposes. This means that a lower rate and fast turnaround are much more important to a prospective client than the quality of translation. An example could be an operation manual that a local company wants translated to get a general idea of how to operate a piece of machinery. I find this approach to quality and price extremely reasonable, because paying more than necessary in such cases is often a waste of a company’s money. If I were a company representative in need of a translation with little concern for high quality, I would also go for bargain basement prices, having no motivation to pay more for something I don’t need. Therefore, as a provider that puts quality first, takes extra time to do a good job, and charges our clients accordingly, we can’t be of much help in such cases. When we get this type of requests, we normally explain that our quality and rates might be unnecessarily high for this kind of job and refer a prospect to another vendor who is better positioned to meet their requirements.

Aside from the above types of requests, we very much enjoy servicing local clients, because a face-to-face contact is rare in our line of business and is therefore especially treasured!

For more information on  how to choose your language service provider, please read this article.

I am sometimes asked about how Velior manages to maintain translation rates above the industry average in the highly competitive English to Russian language combination. I think the key to this is quality. You might say, “Wait a minute, you’ve just mentioned high competition, shouldn’t that drive quality across this combination?” You are right, of course, it should, but, judging by the translations I get to edit, it basically doesn’t. For this reason, a translator who puts quality first has a better chance of outdistancing competitors. So, which specific steps can you take to achieve this? From my experience as an editor who looked at several million translated words over the last five years, I can think of at least three main development areas for you to focus on:

1. Literal translation. Because English and Russian are extremely different, very few texts actually allow literal translation. In most cases, a literal translation is hard to read, unclear, and often ridiculous. Nevertheless, this kind of translation is commonplace in our combination. I hear two main explanations of why this happens, which both seem quite amusing to me. First, a translator often knows that the translation is poor, but just won’t do anything about it due to the lack of motivation, time, or skill. Second, many translators simply think this kind of translation will do, because they’ve always delivered this level of quality and got little or no feedback. Make it your job to never resort to literal translation, and you are on the fast lane on the road to success in your translation career!
2. Poor understanding of the source text. I strongly believe that understanding of the source text has a major impact on quality, but you might be surprised about how many translators think otherwise. It is not at all uncommon for people to translate without a clue as to what they are translating about. The bad news is that machine translation is evolving. One advantage of a human translator over MT is the ability to add value through better understanding of the text. Think about this: without this advantage, your translation becomes similar to MT output. As MT continues to evolve, human translators must invest more effort in understanding the text or be prepared to be put out of business. Change your direction today: instead of producing one vague translation after another, give more thought to what you write and look everything up on the Internet. Resolve to understand as much of the text as possible before committing it to your target segment.
3. Failure to use quality assurance tools. Although numerous tools, including free ApSIC Xbench and CheckMate, are available, many translations are delivered unchecked. In fact, one of our agency clients got so fed up with the errors, which can be easily detected automatically, that they put a special policy in place to discourage this kind of errors. This software became an integral part of our translation workflow long ago, since it improves quality and saves time otherwise spent on manual checks. Because I am so used to it now, I find it increasingly difficult to understand someone who doesn’t use translation environment tools on all or some of their projects. When I hear about this, my first thought is, “But this way you don’t get a bilingual text and can’t do automatic QA!” One of the best things about such tools is their simplicity—you can add them to your process easily and start benefiting from them almost immediately.

In a recent English to Russian translation project, we worked on a file with all internal repetitions extracted (received like this from our client). As this is a relatively uncommon practice, I decided to use this opportunity and explain my thoughts on this subject.

Example of a Repetition

Let’s take a look at this example to illustrate the main challenge associated with extracting the repetitions:

“Note:“ can occur in at least three different situations, and, as plain as it seems, may cause problems:

1. Below a paragraph. The colon is often replaced by a dot. (Примечание. Обратите…)
2. In the middle of a paragraph. I prefer to keep the colon and begin the actual note with a lower-case letter. (… кнопку. Примечание: обратите…)
3. As a subheading. The colon is often deleted. (Примечание)

In this example, the identical source requires three different translations. Imagine what happens when the identical translation “Note.” is used across all three situations instead. For instance, a standalone sentence “Note.” appearing in the middle of a paragraph may look weird. In a subheading, it wouldn’t be that bad, but might still be inconsistent with punctuation in other subheadings, so why let it happen at all?

Does it mean that extracting the repetitions is evil? No, of course not. In some situations, the benefits derived from such extraction may outweigh any potential problems. Consequently, you need to consider applying this approach on a case-by-case basis and exercise caution, making sure you understand the implications.

Pros

1. A significant, if not the main, gain is the possibility of savings. This is especially true when many thousands of repetitions are considered for extraction. The client’s willingness to reduce the costs through extraction is perfectly reasonable in such situations.
2. Extraction might be vital when two or more translators work on the same project simultaneously. Otherwise, they will likely translate repetitions in two or more different ways. This means double work, hence a plain waste of money. An arguably better solution might be to extract the repetitions into a separate file and have it translated by one linguist and then checked by another and/or the editor.
3. Extraction also helps eliminate or at least reduce inconsistent translations of the repetitions. Although many translation environment tools ensure consistency by automatically changing all occurrences when you edit any single repetition (auto-propagation feature), there is always room for human error in this area.

Cons

1. Extracting the repetitions means that you don’t get a final file from your translator. What you get is an intermediate file, which you then need to process to create the final file, e.g. by creating a translation memory and applying it to a source file. Before you go for extraction, you may want to compare these additional management costs against the expected benefits of extraction.
2. As a translator, I prefer to work on a copy that retains its original look, rather than an intermediate “censored” file. With the repetitions extracted, you cannot see the whole picture, which may decrease your understanding of the source text and the sense of ownership. The pain can be somewhat eased if you have the original copy (with all repetitions) at hand for reference. For this reason, I believe that providing such file is a must in most extraction scenarios. Aside from taking the guesswork out of the translation process, it is also important for understanding more technical things such as tags.
3. I believe that in most extraction scenarios the repetitions must be checked in the final file. In practice, however, this step is sometimes skipped, as it seems unimportant. This approach may backfire in various forms of damage, from minor slips to weird mistranslations. Unless you are prepared for substandard quality, I advise to keep this step in your process, perhaps in a form of a quick proofreading.

By the way, Velior provides discounts for the repetitions in our quotes, making it quite affordable to let us handle the repetitions. And how do you approach the repetitions in your translation business? Do you accept work with any unpaid repetitions?

In a recent post, I explained how a higher price might have a positive impact on translation quality. However, the current trend in the translation industry is the price reduction. This topic is now hot in the blogs and translation forums (e.g. see posts by Wendell Ricketts or Jill Sommer), as translators are increasingly pressured to lower prices. Here is my two cents worth:

Our Situation

Indeed, more customers are now interested in discounts. Some also insist on applying a standard minimum rate to each translation instead of negotiating the prices individually, depending on the difficulty or deadline. As a translator, this is certainly frustrating for me. I do believe though in the supply and demand rules of the free market. If the buyers have an increasing demand for cheap, lower-quality translations, they should be able to buy them. I think this is a natural trend in the sagging economy and therefore see no reasons to resist it specifically. If the end users accept this quality, why pay more? Otherwise, the company that buys and uses such translations will lose some of the business due to low quality, review the lessons learned, and proceed with more caution next time.

Recent Quality Issues

Unsurprisingly, we are now receiving more requests to re-do someone else’s work after it was rejected by the client. One of them was a large, almost 100K-word translation. Receiving the client’s feedback on this one is something I would never want to experience as a supplier. Personally, if some day I am forced to always deliver such work and face the risk of similar embarrassment, because I cannot get any better-paid projects and therefore have to translate more to maintain profitability, I’d rather quit this business.

We have recently translated a medical user manual from English to Russian. This job involved a translation memory created by someone else. In many 100% matches, the word “haptic” (element supporting intraocular lens) was translated as “sclera lens.” While this is an outrageous error itself, it is the fact that it still resides in the TM, that is more alarming. This error was once made by a translator and then missed by an editor and proofreader (or were there any?). It might have been spotted by the end users, but no one cared about correcting the TM, hence about the quality of any future jobs. Or, this manual might have never been read, so high quality is just unnecessary.

The other day, I proofread a Russian to English translation made for a large global client. While I had my share of bad translations as an editor over the years and developed a thick skin, this nightmare penetrated my low sensitivity threshold easily. It was literal and unprofessional beyond readability, with the meaning of many sentences escaping me completely. I guess the only reason why such translations make it so far in the supply chain is the low price.

Our Policy

We did not decrease the prices and are unlikely to do so. As the cost of living in Russia continues to increase drastically each year, our rates are bound to increase only. Regardless of the current trend, we will continue to pursue quality and serve our clients to the best of our ability.

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.