No it doesn’t. When I review other people’s translations, I get paid at about ¼ the per-word rate I get for translating. Pretty much an industry-wide standard for independent translation professionals. (That’s per-word pay. Currently I’m on a team of translators getting paid by the hour, and I get the same rate for auditing their work as they get for translating.)
Interesting. Presumably the auditing still comes out cheaper, though, because you can do it faster?
Superficial understanding of the material won’t cut it. To translate properly you need to understand the subject along with both the meaning and the sentence structure. I get a lot of work translating medical files, and the amount of medical terminology I’ve learned and keep learning is prodigious. Likewise with science papers. I’m able to accelerate my terminological learning and thrive with the help of online dictionaries, online sites for translators who quiz each other on precise wordings and pool their knowledge, and Wikipedia in the various languages plus English.
When I first attempted translating an Italian novel* —at the age of 12 and with only a cheap paper dictionary—I discovered the hard way that a translator needs to access a wealth of resources to make the difference between a professional job and a halfassed job. If not for the internet, I’d have to spend almost as much time in the library taking notes as actual translation, given the prodigious size of medical terminology. Not just terminology, but the geographical/administrative/legal etc. context in other countries and how all the parts of the subject matter fit together.
Often you have to back-translate, go both directions at once back and forth, to double and triple-check for accuracy, to not miss the subtleties. All with the goal of making it sound natural in the target language. This is why I only accept translations into my native English, because I can guarantee 100% accuracy. I can translate out of English too, but I can’t make that stringent a guarantee. That 1% or so difference is what separates professional-quality work from dilettantism. A thorough grounding in the other language’s grammar is only the beginning. Subject matter… matters.
*A Ciascuno il Suo by Leonardo Sciascia. Never got anywhere with it. Later, when I turned to Sciascia’s Il Mare Colore di Vino, I broke through the initial barriers and made headway, and from then on I began to land translation gigs.
That’s right. They have maybe 10 times as many translators as reviewers because of the speed difference.
It’s why so many technical translations are done by people who aren’t professional translators but instead professionals of whatever is being translated, and why merely looking for any agency can produce seriously horrible results. Like agents in any other field, those in translation don’t always understand what they’re being asked or looking for.
One of my translation jobs was manuals for SAP. I install SAP. But I specialize on the Ops side: I was given manuals from Purchasing and Sales. Later I found out the name of the guy who’d gotten Ops and looked him up: his background was in Purchasing :smack: And the way I got his name was because we had to explain to the agent that we’d both looked up certain specific terms on-screen and SAP translates those terms differently in different screens, so yes, our translations differred. We had to explain to a certified translator that sometimes words have more than one translation.
Here on the left coast of Soviet Canuckistan, the council members of one city got business cards printed in two languages to impress their Japanese counterparts from their sister city when they came to town. The Japanese understood the English side fine but were not sure why the other side was in Chinese.
Seems like a good place for this Taco Bell polyglot fail.
Ewwww (although the actual item looks like it could be tasty)
They must be totally embarazada!