Fixing a screwed-up OCR job

I was having a pleasant day doing remote tutoring of a friend who is a new memoQ user and talking about various file type issues and approaches to quotation. She mentioned a mutual acquaintance, Helen, who became so disgusted with the incompetent attempts of agencies and some direct clients to convert PDF documents and foist them off on her as "Word documents ready to translate", which the results are, as anyone familiar with such things understands, generally not. Helen has written into her general terms and conditions of business a special clause stipulating a surcharge for both PDFs and any OCR documents. In my opinion, the surcharge for bad OCR should probably be double that for PDF, which I could use as the basis to do a proper OCR conversion.

Experienced translators are well aware of the horrors of bad OCR, including documents that look like the original but which undergo disconcerting font changes with the use of the classic Trados macros to translate, or where text blocks disappear when embedded in wrong-sized boxes, section breaks disrupt text, words display in CAT tools with tags embedded in the middle of words, thus screwing up terminology lookups and TM matches and more. I hope there is a special place in Hell for those who think that usual rates should apply to such time-wasting messes.

There are many remedies for these problems, as solutions such as Dave Turner's CodeZapper macros or the memoQ import option to ignore irrelevant tags for Word documents, but there really is no good substitute for doing the conversion right the first time. This is a skill I have taught to colleagues and clients on a number of occasions, because it saves everyone time and money.

After I ended my chat and tutorial with C, I went to work on a new project due tomorrow. I had been putting it off while working on some tutorials for next week, but I still had time for dealing with it at a relaxed pace. Then I opened the document and realized that while I was distracted earlier this week, the project manager had sent me the horror of all horrible OCR jobs, an automatic conversion that violates every principle of good OCR practice. And it's Sunday. I'm screwed. No PDF to re-do the OCR my way.

Then I realized there are two possible solutions to address this problem which do not involve medium-range missiles.

I could, if the document had a lot of text boxes in bad sequence, print the file to PDF and do another OCR of that. But the text flow in this case is mostly in one block, so that's really not an issue. I followed another procedure which gave me a raw file much like I create when doing a complex OCR, which I then quickly reformatted to give me a usable source file that would not be polluted with tag trash and inconvenient text breaks. The steps were as follows:

1. Save the bad OCR DOC file as plain text with the desired encoding.
2. Open the plain text document in Microsoft Word or another full-featured text editor.
3. Check the sequence of the text flow to be sure that it is correct and complete.
4. Correct any "broken" sentences caused by line breaks in the wrong place in the OCR document. A bit of clever search and replace can usually be used to protect desired paragraph breaks before converting the unwanted ones into spaces to restore the messed-up sentences.
5. Do any other formatting you want for page numbering, bold text, subtitle styles or whatever. 

The resulting file can be saved as RTF, DOC, DOCX or whatever you need and then be used without trouble in your translation environment tool of choice. This will save a lot of time compared to what you will waste dealing with the poorly converted OCR document. But, as part of the customer service philosophy that encourages partners to work together in the most efficient way possible and respect the time and efforts of the other party, appropriate surcharges for the time do apply.

Cleaning up my 18 pages of garbage from the PM took a bit over half an hour altogether, including some corrections of OCR errors, and if I want to get a clean source document after my translation, I simply correct any source errors I find in memoQ as I work and export a fixed source document later.

Stating conditions

Over the course of the past year I've worked from time to time on a post on the importance of general terms and conditions for freelance translators as a tool for avoiding trouble or defining procedures for problem resolution. But the hurly burly of daily life and business has kept me from finishing that particular article as well as my reluctance to publish on the subject before I get around to translating my own T&Cs from German into English.

I do regret that. So many of the "problem" threads I read in public forum are matters where clearly stated terms and conditions might provide some guidance for a better resolution of a dispute. And today I got a little request for an opinion from a friend who might have been helped by such a document as well. In his case, he quoted a job to an end client for the translation of what he thought was a two-page PDF. The customer was some industrial client who requests translations in various languages on an occasional basis, some of which are in language combinations he outsources. The little job was outsourced, translated and delivered, presumably on time. Alles klar, as they say here. But not quite. There was a second page with quite a few more words. It was overlooked in the PDF. And the customer pointed out that this extra text should be translated at no additional cost, because a quotation had been accepted in the belief that it covered the entire document.

I don't know what the ultimate resolution of this will be for my friend; the costs involved are annoying, but not back-breaking if he ends up eating the charges for the second page. But I thought to myself "this is a case where terms and conditions should clearly reserve the right to amend quotations where serious errors are found". And of course he has no written terms and conditions for his business, even though he's been in this game more than twice as long as I have.

It's not enough just to have T&Cs, of course. To apply them to a business transaction, you must make them available, perhaps as an attachment to a quotation, or as I often do making them part of my e-mail signature block.

There are so many issues that come up routinely that can be dealt with this way. Rights to rework an order if deficiencies are found. Limitations of liability to the value of an order except in cases of malice or gross negligence. Interest on payment in arrears. Whatever is important to you and your business can and should be covered in your general terms of business.

But one thing I do not recommend. Often in T&Cs and contracts, I read some nonsense about a particular language version being "authoritative" and translations being for information purposes only. That's bullshit. It may work in some jurisdictions, but certainly not in all. And it is simply insulting. If you can't trust the quality of your contract translation, maybe it's time to stop shopping for language services from linguists with tails. Offering a customer binding terms they can understand (in a language they read well) is a matter of basic respect and in some places a precondition for having an enforceable contract.