The certified rates they are a-changin' in Germany

As a sworn translator for the German courts, for many years, I have provided those outside Germany who have asked for cost estimates for certified translations with an English translation of the law governing such services to official bodies. The government never bothered to have the JVEG translated into English, but I found it useful to do so as a guideline. While the law was only binding for certain clients, it offered useful benchmarks for quotation, which were very much in line with the usual rates charged by qualified, experienced translators. And in fact these rates were a bit low - lower than the prior law I'm told, and certainly too low for some of the hassles involved in the process of certifying documents. (I occasionally found myself working rivets with a hammer and anvil. I'm a translator, not a damned blacksmith.)

After long negotiations and delays, the German federal government has now updated the rates for compensating language services. Some information I received by e-mail is given below (in German), and there is a link to the current law. I will get around to making this available soon in English for my clients and prospects.

The base rate has increased  by about 25% - which in fact does not keep up with the inflation rate in the period during which the old law (JVEG) applied. It is now € 1.55 per 55 characters. Texts not provided in editable electronic form in common languages are subject to a 20 euro cent surcharge per line. For more details, read below or check the link.

*******

Das Zweite Kostenrechtsmodernisierungsgesetz wurde am 23.07.2013 vom Bundespräsidenten unterzeichnet. Das Gesetz ist im heutigen Bundesgesetzblatt Nr. 42 vom 29.07.2013, S. 2586 ff. veröffentlicht worden (http://www.bgbl.de/Xaver/text.xav?start=%2F%2F*[%40attr_id%3D%27bgbl113s2586.pdf%27]&skin=pdf&bk=Bundesanzeiger_BGBl&tf=xaver.component.Text_0&hlf=xaver.component.Hitlist_0).

Danach ergeben sich ab dem 1. August 2013 für Dolmetscher und Übersetzer, die für die Justiz tätig sind, insbesondere folgende Änderungen:

Vergütungssätze Übersetzungen:

Das Honorar für eine Übersetzung beträgt 1,55 Euro für jeweils angefangene 55 Anschläge des schriftlichen Textes (Grundhonorar).

Bei nicht elektronisch zur Verfügung gestellten editierbaren Texten erhöht sich das Honorar auf 1,75 Euro für jeweils angefangene 55 Anschläge (erhöhtes Honorar).

Ist die Übersetzung wegen der besonderen Umstände des Einzelfalls, insbesondere wegen der häufigen Verwendung von Fachausdrücken, der schweren Lesbarkeit des Textes, einer besonderen Eilbedürftigkeit oder weil es sich um eine in Deutschland selten vorkommende Fremdsprache handelt, besonders erschwert, beträgt das Grundhonorar 1,85 Euro und das erhöhte Honorar 2,05 Euro.

Vergütungssätze Dolmetschen:

Das Honorar des Dolmetschers beträgt für jede Stunde 70 Euro und, wenn er ausdrücklich für simultanes Dolmetschen herangezogen worden ist, 75 Euro.

Maßgebend ist ausschließlich die bei der Heranziehung im Voraus mitgeteilte Art des Dolmetschens.

Ausfallhonorar:

Ein ausschließlich als Dolmetscher Tätiger erhält eine Ausfallentschädigung, soweit er durch die Aufhebung eines Termins, zu dem er geladen war und dessen Aufhebung nicht durch einen in seiner Person liegenden Grund veranlasst war, einen Einkommensverlust erlitten hat und ihm die Aufhebung erst am Terminstag oder an einem der beiden vorhergehenden Tage mitgeteilt worden ist. Die Ausfallentschädigung wird bis zu einem Betrag gewährt, der dem Honorar für zwei Stunden entspricht.

Bitte beachten Sie, dass für die Rechnungslegung nach neu oder alt das Datum der ursprünglichen Beauftragung (für Übersetzungen) bzw. des Termins (für Dolmetschleistungen) maßgeblich ist.

...
 

Für den Bundesvorstand

André Lindemann

Präsident des BDÜ

Stumbling toward pro databases

One of the most popular posts to date on this blog is one I wrote about 13 months ago on Finding good translators in which I listed the online search pages for professional associations around the world. There are other lists out there as well. However, when one begins to use these online databases, frustration quickly sets in, because they are in no way uniform in their language, format, search criteria or much of anything else. In fact, the "pros" often seem almost as unprofessional as proZ.

That is why there has been so much excitement since I initially hinted at the possibility of a unified database of qualified professionals with uniform classification criteria and interesting features such as "fuzzy matching" of subject areas. The idea came up in a chat with the database architect, the owner of LSP.net, who created the basic database structure and matching algorithms over the course of a decade of considerable research and investment to enable another small company of his (the translation agency zappmedia GmbH) "punch above its weight" with a few project managers doing the work of two or three times their number using what is now marketed as the commercial product OTM (the Online Translation Manager).

Although I used this database structure occasionally for about three years as had the friend and colleague who introduced me to it (a progressive pro association officer), neither of us considered a possible link between the world of commerce and the needs of often commercially naive professionals. Silly, really. My friend at LSP.net had no idea that I had been talking off the ears at the ATA, ITI, BDÜ, SFT and elsewhere for ages pushing for this and said in a rather puzzled manner the day before I tried to take my first vacation in ten years, "But Kevin, it already exists. The work is done. The associations can have it."

WTF???!!!

I was, needless to say, a bit speechless.

"What's in it for you?" I asked.

"Well, I can use it too," he replied. Those association databases are mostly a waste of space, and my PMs and I waste too much time looking for the right translator if that person isn't already in our existing records." Made sense. Almost too much sense.

"But why give it away?!" I asked.

"Because I can. It costs me nothing now. The work is done. I'll need a few days to set up the admin so the associations handle their own data, but so what? They can have that. Late Christmas present. It's just time that someone did something to make a real database. And we already did. The best."

I knew that was true, knew there was no way that any translators' organization would match the resources invested here or the expertise in IT. But my God - even his competitors could use this! Direct clients and individuals could search directly for the most qualified translator in an association anywhere in the world! And what would become of ProZ, where the search results are dominated by much more important factors like whether a translator has paid monetary tribute to King Henry's Argentine Junta or shopped a bride with his Ukrainians, collected Kuhdose points, P'd red and other great stuff? Qualifications? Yeah, right.

But in the midst of all this Sturm und Drang about about Ze Ultimate Worldwide Translators und Interpreters Get Gigs Yesterday (ZUWTIGGY) tool, I discovered another pretty awesome free database of translators and interpreters and maintained at public cost by public agencies for public benefit. In five languages no less.

For some years I had heard rumors that my status as a court-sworn translator with Munich's District Court I could be looked up online, but none of the people who seemed so terribly interested in "proof" of my qualified pudding seemed to know how to execute the complex incantations required to tease such Secrets from the World Wide Web. I didn't know either, so I just tried the old fashion approach of if hours or days of clever research have yielded nothing, just ask Google. So I did. Minutes later, I found myself in another Land, "aus dieser Welt gefahren" so to speak. There was this guy, Kevin Scott Lossner, who seems to be a sworn translator for "Landgericht München I". Damn, that was hard!

Searches can specify region (important perhaps if time is critical or you need on-site service ASAP), the sort of service provider you seek (translator/interpreter), whether the court oath has been executed in fact and what languages are involved. Postal codes, cities, names, and German federal state can also be used as search criteria. There are over 22,000 persons in the database. I suspect that not all of them are under oath as I am.

If you are a sworn translator or interpreter wanting to find yourself in a way less fun that a plane trip to an ashram in Goa, try this URL:

http://www.justiz-dolmetscher.de/suche_action

Or just click it now if you are a translation buyer or private individual who needs the services of a sworn translator or interpreter. The Database of Delivery from the Valley of the Shadow of ProZ will offer a more "granular" search, i.e. you can find a freak like me who can do research chemistry and understand, translate and certify documents about it, but it's still purty durned NIFTY.

Would you certify sewage?

Good afternoon, Mr. Lossner,
   We have received the attached document from a patent attorney. An English translation of it has already been prepared by the attorney's office, but it must be certified. Thus in this case it would be necessary to check it in order to issue the certification.
  Could you please inform us of the cost and time required to certify this translation? The customer has also informed us that there will be further translations in the future, particularly for patents. Thus we would be interested in working together long-term. Thank you for your consideration of this matter.

Best regards,

Your Expert Translation Agency

I always get a sinking feeling when the customer thinks he's able to translate a document himself and get me or some other court-sworn translator to rubber-stamp it as "true and correct". Any certification would require a very careful word-for-word review of the translation, comparing it against the source text. Anything else would be unethical. Of course there are colleagues who don't care about such niceties and send stacks of pre-stamped paper to their agency customers for use with God-only-knows-what-translations. On their heads be it. My stamp and signature put my reputation, such as it is, at stake, and I don't see the need to do that in support of work by King Louie & Co.

In twelve years of commercial translation work, I have yet to see a single patent translation submitted to me for review that could pass without heavy editing. Even the best translators can have a bad day, but it seems that the patent translators some of my clients and prospects use never have a good one. I assume that the translator who did this particular piece of work had just had his dog run over by a steam roller.

The first line gave me a bad premonition of things to come. It started out like this:

Huh? A quick look at the original text revealed the monkey's tail:

OK... well, anyone can substitute a word by accident when distracted, but... the rest of the first paragraph wasn't much better. It read a bit like Tarzan's first, painstaking steps with the English language, learning from picture books and guessing at words. The second paragraph continued the tour de farce:

I'll let you, Dear Reader, take a wild guess at that one. A quick scan at the remaining 13 pages showed the same level of expertise in every paragraph my unfortunate eyes glanced upon.

My response to the inquiry was perhaps less patient than it could have been, but the day was rather a hectic one, and if I am to embark on a long-term collaboration with a service broker, I expect this broker to be able to tell liquid manure from drinking water. I figured it was time for a lesson in colloquial American English, so I opened with

No way, José!

(in normal font color and at ordinary size for courtesy) and suggested that a retranslation of the patent might be advisable, as there was not a single sentence I saw worth recycling as text. Alas, I fear the client prefers British colloquialisms or insists on "saving" money with his fine translation skills, for I heard not a further word in response to my proposal.

I feel sorry for the inventor. The poor fellow put his trust in an attorney who surely is not cheap, and said attorney probably charged him a fortune for that dog's breakfast "translation". In this case, it's obvious that machine translation played no role; Google Translate would have offered an improvement of the mess I was given.

These days, it doesn't take a lot of effort to find a qualified translator to translate a text like this. Professional associations like the BDÜ, ITI, SFT and the ATA offer directories of translators and their special skills or qualifications, including those able to prepare sworn translations. Or there's always Google and relevant keywords. Often, the worst thing that can happen is to put your trust in an attorney or other agent who in turn passes the text elsewhere, and from there on further it goes and ends up with a cranky guy like me who is likely to have a stroke trying to patch the holes in that moldy Swiss cheese.

Those who need translations for important purposes should do themselves a favor by hiring a professional to to a professional job. It's almost always cheaper to get it right the first time.

Put on de Red Pee fo da agency

When I received a message from a colleague that ProZ had begun "certifying" translation agencies with the dreaded red Plob, I thought she was joking. There are real certifications for serious businesses, verifying that their documented procedures are orderly and traceable among other things. These include ISO 9001 and EN 15038, and the more ambitious agencies usually seek these because they are required for business with some large clients or RFPs. Surely no serious translation agency would feel the need to be "certified" by The Translation Workhouse with its increasingly debased standards. Well, once again, I have learned that human greed and folly have depths which even my cynicism cannot plumb. If one goes to the ProZ home page but is not logged in, the link to these "certified" proZtitution agencies is visible. I followed it and found a list of corporate members, some well known, some with the Plob.

What, I wonder, is being certified here? I am familiar with ISO 9001 and EN 15038, and I can't really imagine a lot of value that would be added here. But perhapZ the SiteStaff have developed important and relevant criteria, such as testing the timeliness of bank transfers for a specified amount. Both end customers and freelance translators would benefit from knowing that an agency using ProZ has been verified as a registered business with a working bank account.

So KudoZ to the phoax at Ze Zite for distinguishing such select translation service resellers (TSRs) as:

Have you considered applying for the Certified PRO Network?

Dear test123,

From the information available in your profile, I see that you offer translation services in German to English, a language pair that is currently under-represented in the ProZ.com Certified PRO Network. In the first part of this year, 1312 jobs in German to English were posted at ProZ.com, but there were only 104 members in the Certified PRO Network to respond to them. As you can see, then, this might represent an excellent growth opportunity for you.

If you would like to be included in the Certified PRO Network and increase your opportunities to meet clients at ProZ.com while distinguishing yourself as a professional, please complete your application here:

http://www.proz.com/pro-tag/info/express-interest

Make sure you also watch this short video on how to complete your application before submitting your application for review: http://www.proz.com/videos/Tutorials%20on%20ProZ.com/746

Find out more about the ProZ.com Certified PRO Network here: http://www.proz.com/pro-tag/info/about

Looking forward to welcoming you to the network!

Kind regards,

Maria Kopnitsky

ProZ.com Certified PRO Network

ProZ.com

The translation workhouse

-------------------------

ProZ.com Headquarters

P.O. Box 903

Syracuse, NY 13201 USA

The preceding letter was copied exactly from the mail forwarded to me by a former ProZ moderator. The account "test123" is a testing profile set up years ago to explore certain new features of the site. He and I are both amused and puzzled by the invitation for a nonentity to join the fabled red pee network. If it is in fact true that there are only 104 "approved" red bubbles (as he calls them) for a language combination as common as German to English, it makes you wonder what's up. I know there has been a huge exodus of talent from the platform, especially in European countries where the disregard of data privacy and security concerns runs strongly counter to laws and expectations. In fact, a lot of the best translators I know for German and English are no longer ProZ members, and outsourcers who restrict their listings to the membership or the red bubbled ones are simply shutting themselves away from a lot of the best talent now.

It's also clear that these invitation processes are not personally reviewed by those responsible. I really can't imagine that Ms. Kopnitsky believes that "test123" is even a serious alias. Many of us now use aliases on PrAdZ to keep the search index trash for repetitive content in Tamil and god-knows-how-many-other languages from burying real content we rely on for professional publicity. But "test123"? It takes a special kind of faith to believe in that.

German regionalism in the crosshairs

One of the problems regarding sworn translations in Germany is that there is no guarantee that they will be accepted for official purposes if the certifying translator is registered with a different state. In some cases, certified translations have even been rejected if the translator was sworn by a different regional court in the same federal state. In Austria, by contrast, certified translations from sworn translators are accepted anywhere in the country.

In practice, there are relatively few objections raised, and a translation certified by a translator sworn in Bavaria will probably be accepted in the Saarland or North Rhine Westphalia, etc. But as is too often the case with life in Germany, there is the uncertainty of bureaucratic confusion and scope for abuse by some arbitrary, petty twit who hasn't had enough coffee.

With regard to certified translations that may end soon. In the member forums for the German translators association BDÜ, the head of the Berlin-Brandenburg group commented a few days ago that the question of whether a translation certified by a translator from one region will be accepted in another region should be resolved in the very near future. Changes in the law are expected at the federal level, which would make a certification in one state valid in all other states. However, he also noted that this was to have taken place on the 12th of December, and here we are somewhat later... as they say here, "gut Ding braucht Weil".

A riveting task

I hate certified translations. After my partner's official change of address from the Saarland nullified her authorization to certify translations for official purposes, I decided to obtain such authorization myself from a German federal state that doesn't care where I live. Bavaria is very progressive in this respect, while Brandenburg (where I actually live) has been unable to get its act together in the past two years and pass a law regarding the authorization of translators and interpreters for official purposes. As a consequence, here and in some other states, no new persons have been sworn since the German High Court in 2007 decision forbade doing so based solely on administrative rules (a law is now required in each state).

So anyway, after a little paperwork, a short trip to Munich and a nice chat with pleasant court officials with charming accents, I became a court-sworn translator for Bavaria. Some people think of this as a great career move to get more work at decent rates. (German courts have a defined payment schedule which is more reasonable than one encounters with many clients - really bad copy can be charged up to something like 4 euros per line, though the base rate is only 1.25 euros per line.) I didn't really care about that; I'm drowning in work, and I was rather hoping this wouldn't attract more. I just wanted to be able to help out certain favored clients who occasionally require certification from a sworn translator and do a bit of pro bono work for people from English-speaking countries who are crazy enough to get married or divorced in Germany. (The bureaucracy is amazing. We've had our rings for four years now, and we still haven't gotten things sorted out.)

Now comes the hate part. Given the relative scarcity of translators with particular specialties like mine who can do sworn translations, I have in fact attracted some of that extra business that I didn't want. That's OK, because I've gotten to know some very fine new clients that way, and I just say no to more of the boring, routine stuff that anyone could do. Doing a few pages of a certified translation, attaching it to the original or a copy, stamping, signing and sending it all off by registered mail is a nice break from time to time. What I dread are the big translations that need certification. They hurt my wrist. I have yet to find a reasonable way of fastening a thick stack of papers together in a way that ensures it cannot be tampered with. My current procedure (suggested by the retired metallurgy professor next door who took me into his workshop to deal with a particularly nasty case) involves riveting the whole mess. I use a hand punch on all the paper, then drive a rivet through the hole and hammer the thing down on a small anvil. Maybe I should have been a blacksmith instead of a translator. I know that lawyers and notaries have better ways of dealing with this, but given some of the legal restrictions here in Germany, I'm going to be very careful before adopting any of their methods. A good solution to the problem might be found with a quick cross-post to the BDÜ member forums where surely hundreds before me have faced the same challenge. But when the task is merely an occasional irritant, once a week or less often, rather than a daily nuisance, these things tend to be forgotten in the daily tumult and drag on....