The Ultimate Comparative Screwjob Calculator for translation rates

Some years ago I put out a number of little spreadsheet tools to help independent translators and some friends with small agencies to sort out the new concepts of "discount" created by the poisonous and unethical marketing tactics of Trados GmbH in the 1990s and adopted by many others since then. One of these was the Target Price Defense Tool (which I also released in German).

The basic idea behind that spreadsheet was the rate to charge on what looked to be a one-off job with a new client who came out of nowhere proposing some silly scale of rate reductions based on (often bogus and unusable) matches. So, for example, if your usual rate was USD 0.28 per word and that's what you wanted to make after all the "discounts" were applied, you could plug in the figures from the match analysis and determine that the rate to quote should be USD 0.35, for example.

Click on the graphic to view and download the Excel spreadsheet

Fast forward 11 years. Most of the sensible small agencies run by translators who understand the qualities needed for good text translation are gone, their owners retired, dead or hiding somewhere after their businesses were bought up and/or destroyed by unscrupulous and largely incompetent bulk market bog "leaders" with their Walmart-like tactics. Good at sales to C-level folk, with perhaps a few entertaining "inducements" on the side, but good at delivering the promised value? Not so much in cases I hear. And many of the good translators who haven't simply walked away from the bullshit have agreed to some sort of rate scale based on matching (despite the fact that there is no standard whatsoever on how different tools calculate these "matches" and now with various kinds of new and nonsensical "stealth" matches being sneaked in with little or no discussion).

So now, it's not so much whether a translator will deal with a given rate scale for a one-off job, but more often what the response should be to a new and usually more abusive rate scale proposed by some cost- and throat-cutting bogster who really cares enough to shave every cent that an independent translator can be intimidated to yield, thus destroying whatever remaining incentive there might be to go the extra mile in solving the inevitable unexpected problems one might find in many a text to translate.

And this, in fact, was the question I woke up to this morning. I told the friend who asked to go look for my ancient Target Price Defense Tool, but I was told that it wasn't helpful for the case at hand. (It actually was, but because of the different perspective that wasn't immediately obvious.)

Click on the graphic to view and download the Excel spreadsheet

So I built a new calculation tool quickly before breakfast which did the same calculations but in a little different layout with a somewhat different perspective: the Comparative Screwjob Calculator (screenshot above), because really, the point of these match scales is to screw somebody.

Shortly after that, I was asked to include the calculations of "internal matches" from SDL Trados (which are referred to as "homogeneity" in the memoQ world, stuff that is not in the translation memory but where portions of text in the document or collection of documents have some similarity based on their character strings - NOT their linguistic sense). And of course there are other creatively imagined matches in some calculation grids - for subsegments in larger sentences (expect to get screwed if an author writes "for example" a lot) or based on some sort of loser's machine pseudo-translation algorithms that some monolingual algorithm developer has decided without evidence might save the translator a little effort - cut that rate to the bone!). So I expanded the spreadsheet to allow for additional nonsense match rate types ("internal/other") and to compare a third grid which can be used, for example, to develop a counterproposal if you are currently billing based on an agreed rate scale and a new one is proposed (all the time keeping in view how much you are losing versus the full rate which might very well be getting charged to the end customer anyway).

Click on the graphic to view and download the Excel spreadsheet

The result was the Ultimate Comparative Screwjob Calculator (screenshot above). Now that's probably too optimistic a name for it, because surely those who think only of translators as providers of bulk material to be ground up for linguistic sausage have other ways to take their kilos of flesh for the delivery mix.

If this all sounds a bit ludicrous, that's because it is. I am a big fan of well-managed processes myself; I began my career as a research chemist with a knowledge of multivariate statistical optimization of industrial processes and used this knowledge to save - and make - countless millions for my employers or client companies and save hundreds of jobs for ordinary people. I get it that cost can be a variable in the equation, because starting some 34 years ago I began plugging it in to my equations along with resin mix components and whatnot.

But the objective I never lost sight of was to deliver real value. And that included minimizing defects (applying the Taguchi method or some other modeling technique or just bloody common sense). And ensuring that expectations are met, with all stakeholders (don't you hate that word? it reminds me of a Dracula movie in my dreams where I hold the bit of holly wood in my hand as we open the coffin of thebigword's CEO) protected. That is something too few slick salesfolk in the bulk market bog understand. They talk a lot of nonsense about quality (Vashinatto: "doesn't matter"; Bog Diddley: "no complaints from my clients who don't understand the target language", etc.). But they are unwilling to admit the unsustainable nature of their business models and the abusive toll it takes on so many linguistic service providers.

So use these spreadsheets I made - one and all - if you like. But think about the processes with which you are involved and the rates you need to provide the kind of service you can put your name to. The kind where you won't have to say desperately and mendaciously "It wasn't me!" because economic and time pressures meant that you were unable to deliver your best work. That goes as much for respectable translation companies (there are some left) as well as for independent service professionals who want to commit to helping all their clientele receive what they need and deserve for the long run.

Double Vision with MS PowerPoint to Check Translations

I learned an interesting thing tonight thanks to David Hardisty, who teaches translation technical skills at Universidade Nova in Lisbon and translates quite a bit from European Portuguese to English. For all the years - decades? - that I have used Microsoft PowerPoint, I was never aware that it is possible to run two different presentations - as presentations - at the same time.

Why is this useful? If you want to do a detailed, screen-by-screen comparison of two different presentations - say a German original and its Arabic translation - and ensure that everything looks OK with the with animations, effects, text sizing in fields, etc. this can enable more focused, accurate comparisons. Just clicking through the slides in two windows in edit mode might miss something that depends on dynamic elements in the application.

Here's how you do this:

1. Open the first PowerPoint file.

2. Go to Slide Show... Set Up Slide Show... choose Browsed by an individual (window)

3. Click OK. Then press F5. Resize the presentation window as you like and put it wherever you want on one of your screens.

Then repeat Steps 1 through 3 for the second presentation. And the third if you like. And....

memoQuickie: comparing target text versions

One way to compare versions of a translation in memoQ (for example, after editing) is to use the source text version comparison features. This is a workaround which I hope will be implemented as a feature some day.

With versioning activated in your project (Project home > Settings > Document versioning), import the target texts as if they were source texts, using Reimport > No (and a search for the other file version) to create a version history. Then select History/Reports... from the context menu of the file in the Project home > Translations list.

Select the "major versions" of interest and export a two-column view of the changes.

This view will be an HTML file.

The columnar comparison of the two versions shows differences highlighted and some statistics on them.

Alternatively, document comparison features in Microsoft Word can be used, but this method applies to all file types.

Tracked changes in memoQ 5 & what more we need

A recent round of e-mail with colleagues reminded me of how critical revision workflows are for many people and how too often we must resort to workarounds, because our translation environment tools don't quite do what we require of them. Tracking changes and comparing versions is necessary in many different situations, and no single method will cover all needs.

memoQ 5 offers the ability to track differences between minor versions in the translation window. What is a minor version? A major version is created when a version of a source text is imported. The first version of the source text imported will be version 1.0, the second will be 2.0 and so on. When various things occur with the translation of a source text version, such as an export, an update by importing a bilingual file, a change in the person working on the document or the creation of a status "snapshot", a minor version is created with sequential numbering after the decimal point: version 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, etc. memoQ allows you to compare the current translated text to any previous minor version of the same source text version. Of course, in order to use versioning and tracked changes, versioning must be enabled for a project on the first page of the project setup wizard. It is currently not possible to enable versioning later, nor, unfortunately, is it possible to make versioning active as the default for new projects. I hope that memoQ will allow both of these options in the future.

There are three ways to activate the tracked changes view in memoQ. Two of these are equivalent: the menu option Translation > Toggle Track Changes > (options) and the corresponding icon in the memoQ toolbar with the same options:

Selecting the Custom option opens the following dialog:

The third way to activate tracked changes is undocumented as far as I know. It was shared with me just recently by a new user who has a brilliant knack for finding new ways of pushing memoQ to its limits. Pressing Ctrl+F5 with the cursor in a target segment begins tracking changes to that segment. Confirming the segment removes the tracking. Change tracking can be turned on for various individual segments this way, and the toggling of the feature is independent for each target segment. This can be useful if you are changing several segments but don't want to lose track of the original text until you are sure of the edited text. Here is an example of a minor version comparison with additional editing in Segment 2 using this undocumented mode for tracked changes:

Combining or splitting segments appear to erase the row histories for the segments affected.

The process of comparing minor versions will work well to review changes made by editors working externally to memoQ on bilingual files with other tools, for example. What is missing is an effective way to revert changes made to individual segments other than by retyping. Nor is it possible to revert entirely to a previous minor version (except by the workaround of saving a corresponding bilingual file as a backup and re-importing it).

There are also issues if changes between versions are to be exported for review in other tools, such as a word processor (Microsoft Word and others). While one could use the document comparison function in these or other tools to create a mark-up of changes, it would be nice if this were possible directly from memoQ (in the RTF table bilingual format as well).

Another idea shared by the same translator who discovered the use of the Ctrl+F5 key combination for toggling tracked changes is making changes stand out through the use of color in an export format that would support this. The color could be applied to the text which has changed or to the text which remains the same. (The latter case might be more appropriate if the changed text has significant formatting to be reviewed and the color would cause confusion.) Background highlight colors might also be used. In a similar vein, she suggested that this coloring of the target text might be used to indicate other things, such as 100% or context matches. Not only would this make it easier to focus on changes scattered throughout a large text, it would also be of great help in cases where one is not supposed to look at 100% matches and make changes to them. Proofreading is otherwise difficult. This is why clients often using color marking of some sort for text changes, but applying this to matches or version changes of a translation for the same source text would make this concept far more useful.

A few possible workarounds do come to mind for memoQ, but these only apply to a few situations. In the bilingual RTF table exports, one could sort by the status column, then change the background color of rows that are 100% or context matches, then re-sort the table by segment number. Or write a macro to do that. The bilingual DOC format could also have 100% matches marked in color using a macro with an appropriate regular expression to identify those segments. Such coloring options are available in Trados Workbench and are important to the revision workflows of some financial translators I know and probably many others. Similar ideas were shared with Kilgray about a year ago, and I do hope that the upcoming version 6 will offer us something of this sort as well as many other advancements in the management of translation versions.