Hey, I blame that on whomever came up with the expression “human resources.” They’re probably related to whomever invented MRP (material resources planning) and ERP (which is a management system, enterprise resource planning, and not a kind of software unlike most people who “buy an ERP” believe).
Dad was a Personnel Manager in the early 70s. Uncle José Mari, some 15 years later, was a Human Resources Manager. Both did mostly payroll, vacations and, once every two years if nobody got stupid about it, “general contract” negotiations. But apparently it ain’t right to have persons working for you any more.
That doesn’t seem so unusual to me. I work in a group of software engineers, and whenever we’re asked to do a new project, our boss says things like, “Do we have the resources for this work?” She means the people with free time. It’s standard terminology. Also sometimes, "We need more resources for this, " which means “We need to bring over a programmer from another group.”
I know it’s common usage, but I *hate *that. I’m perfectly aware the company I work for would probably prefer I was a robot, but they shouldn’t rub it in that way.
I’m glad to hear you got it done, and I hope you have a happy new year!
See, I’ve heard it in this usage before, where it’s sort of like a mass noun (where it needn’t be any particular people or number of people, but just “the free person-hours”), but this was the first time I’ve heard “a resource” meaning exactly “an individual worker.”
Not since some genius came up with degrees in translation, thus rendering previous language-skill certificates and good ol’ experience useless.
The mother of one of my coworkers is Welsh; he grew up multilingual, spending Christmas and summers in Wales, as well as a couple school years, and otherwise attending the German School in Madrid. She’s been working as a translator for decades. But when the new degrees got invented, those wonderful morons at Human Resources and Procurement started demanding them. She had to get a Master’s. Her experience was useless in the eyes of the Little Morons With The Power.
Who, me? Bitter because 99% of the people in those jobs seem to be Vocational School graduates who can’t find their arse with both hands while suffering from the runs? Noooooooo!
I must have done something exceedingly evil in a past life. I have a client who managed to negotiate a very special fee on the dubious grounds of being a friend of a friend. He is becoming more extreme in his demands - the latest being that this week (no precise time specified) he will send me a 20-pager but he needs it done by Thursday. No matter what. I will say 4 working days. No matter what.
I can do 20 pages in less than that but this being school holidays I do have some other stuff to do which is incompatible with all-nighters or even all-dayers.
The icing on the cake is that based on previous translations I’ve done for him, it’s going to be turgid academic content that takes 20 pages to make a point that could be made in a couple of paragraphs.
To be fair, language skill != translation skill (“Marie-Claire! You speak English! Type this in English for me, would you?”)
It’s sometimes hard to remember, especially as a freelancer, but you can fire a client. I’ve had to do this on rare occasions when it became clear that a particular client had no idea what was involved in what they were demanding, how much I might expect to get paid for such a thing, or how to pay attention when I clarified these things.
The thing is, 98% of my work is from a single translation agency. I’ve been working with them (in effect, for them) for 2 years, and they know that I’m a good translator - and much more importantly, that I’m willing to take a lot of work and that I always hand it in on time. I don’t see them suddenly asking for a some degree or certificate. What’s in it for them?
Absolutely - he’s first or second on my list of clients most likely to be fired, right up there with the slow/non-payers. The best part is when it comes to payment and he asks for a discount on his already highly discounted rate.
Yes, but IME translation degree != translation ability, too. Specially Spanish “sworn translators,” who strive for absolute literalness. The story a friend (eye surgeon) tells about sending an article to the Medical College’s official translator and getting it back with “cristalino duro” hard crystalline, a part of the eye translated as “glassy five-peseta coin” and “cataratas” cataracts as “waterfalls” may be an urban legend, even if he claims it happened to him… but I know what I’ve seen official translators do. 99.999999% of them have a “literature” background and wanted to translate the undiscovered Shakespeare; sending material involving sciences to one of those is like giving a hammer to a toddler and letting him loose in a china store.
Hell, the other day one of my translation-bachelor’s Spanish classmates asked “life sciences means politics and economy, right?” :smack: Spanish high schools have a specific “life sciences” track, he evidently wasn’t paying attention those four years.
I’m a project manager in this strange little industry.
Lately I’ve had a bunch of projects where I feel compelled to apologize to my translators for what I’m about to send them. The best one had to be the client that sent me photographs of post-its with handwriting on them, to be translated.
Nava, I take experience over degrees any day of the week. Especially subject-specific experience. (Newly degreed translators seem to think they can translate anything, which is HUGE red flag. No, you at 24 are not a subject expert on legal contracts, medicine, advertising copy and mechanical engineering) Experience is followed very closely by reliability, timeliness and flexibility. You better believe the translator who did those damn post-its is now up at the top of my list.
I don’t know if you guys see a lot of this, but many clients have a lot of trouble grasping that different types of texts can take different amounts of time. A 20,000 word moron-friendly user manual and a 20,000 word patent filing* are two very different animals.
*(Medical device patent, to be particular, which included someone’s dissertation. It was like all the governmental and academic bombast you could conjure, wrapped in seven layers of legalese with medical terminology inserted at every possible opportunity. It was satan’s translation project.)
Let me just add that I used to do some translations from German to English - and those technical/legal/government documents were the worst. Not only was it chock full of bullshit gibberish, but many of the sentences had two/three or more ways to interpret them. Even the people who gave me the documents were not exactly sure of the exact meaning of the sentence(s). The good thing was it paid well - the bad thing was that it sometimes took an hour to translate a simple sentence as it was so vague.
I am with Obsidian - I spent a good part of my career managing, buying and selling translations. Translators are uniformly harassed, but that is because there is no standardization in the industry. don’t believe me? I am sitting on some experiments that would do so by putting a measure on the quality of a translation. Actually I would need original docs, and various drafts beginning to end. Am open to language pairs at this point. Certainly willing to sign appropriate mutual NDAs to protect your clients and mine. Anyone interested?
I was always strictly German to English - which was valuable in Germany, but not so much here in the USA. Most of my American and British friends in Germany were the same - but we all had more work than we could handle, and more often than not, refused some assignments that were simply too tedious or time consuming unless they were paying extra.
An ex-friend of mine (we had a falling out) has made a nice bundle of cash doing English lyrics for German rock bands and singers. Last I heard was that he was getting royalties off of hundreds of songs he has done over the years - I should have gone into that business! He just bought a condo in Sylt (an expensive German resort area) from the money he has made.
I used to do Korean-English translations (both ways) and have done everything from infomercials to employer contracts to official documents. I hated it - mostly because people tend to assume that if you are fluent in both languages, translation is the easiest thing in the world. Oh, here’s five pages. That’ll only take you like, what, an hour, right? Is 30 bucks enough? :rolleyes:
That’s another reason I like working for an agency: the rates are fixed, I’m always paid on time, and *I never have to deal directly with clients. *
(There are downsides, of course. The rates aren’t great, although they make up for it in volume; worse, I’m totally dependent on what they provide me, so if my work starts to deteriorate, or if they find someone better, there goes my livelihood. Still, it’s better than wasting my time looking for work and actually talking to people, something I’d rather avoid).
