Cheap translation, like coffee

Coffee is a commodity. Except when it isn't. A recent set of articles in the New York Times explored the economics and problems of the international coffee trade. Like many agricultural commodities, coffee is subject to boom/bust cycles in which high demand leads to overproduction, which causes prices to drop to unsustainable levels, with production capacities eventually diminishing again through neglect. The overproduction, unsustainability and crash part may sound familiar to some in the translation industry, though the campesinos struggling in the fields of words seem to have little hope for boom years again.

But Übersetzung ist nicht gleich Übersetzung, and the same is true for coffee. There is a culture of specialty coffee, which emphasizes balance and quality and is fit for the purpose of drinking. One author making a case for drinking better coffee wrote:

"Here’s my advice: stop drinking cheap coffee. It’s getting worse, as those who deal in bargain-basement coffees blend in more and more of the 'bad stuff' to meet a price point. The “good stuff” will get better and better, as food lovers recognize the miracle that great coffee is, and value it as such. It’s a truism in food: eating less but better leads to maximum health, happiness and value."

This is rather good advice for translation consumers as well. If cost is really an issue, commission less translation work, but consider carefully the content to be translated and look for a real professional to do it to protect your image and the health of your business. The hash pipe dream peddled by the MT vendors, who tell you they can translate millions of articles with "acceptable" quality, requiring just a bit of post-edit tweaking by the campesinos who work for beans, is an amusing, but unrealistic hallucination that can take you on a very bad trip. But what of the masses of bilinguals ready to take on big volume projects assigned in the care of major, lion-hearted LSPs promising a single point of contact, top quality, fast service and low cost? Equally bogus. In some submarkets of translation there are surely some good translators willing to scratch in the dirt like chickens for a few grains to survive on, but any purchasing agent willing to risk is employer's health on this unsustainable situation had better have a Plan B for when it doesn't work out and he gets fired for incompetence. While price does not necessarily correlate with value, other issues such as timing, short lines of communication, availability and trust are usually - among intelligent beings - more important than price. Or would you rather send a highly confidential employment contract to an industry "leader" who sends out copies by unsecured e-mail to 400 translators around the world asking for their best price? You would? You're fired!

Like the producers of cheap coffee, major LSPs doing hundreds of thousands of words in a matter of days pour anything into the mix to meet a deadline and a price point. The only thing that usually gets left out is the quality needed to produce an usable result. To those who find this situation adequate, I would like to point out greater potential savings with much less hassle: Google Translate is free. Of course it's crap, but if you think what you'll get from a language service provider paying translators one to three cents a word is any better, it's time to stop hitting the pipe.

Of course it's difficult to generalize about the diverse world of text to be translated. A recent discussion on another blog about whether freelance translators earn "enough" discussed some of the differences between the axis of FIGES and those translating in more exotic language pairs. I live in the "GE" part of FIGES, so my perspectives on the world are inevitably influenced by this. However, certain basic principles do seem to apply across languages and borders even when the absolute numbers differ.

"Ah," you say, "But sometimes that cheap work really is good, even better!" True. One of my best "competitors", a better translator in my best specialties with more experience as a translator and a better work ethic, charged significantly less than I did in most cases for many years. She was the preferred choice for many projects and rightly so: I would even recommend that clients call her first and contact me if she had no capacity (often that was why they were calling in the first place). Well, eventually this person woke up to the reality of the market, and from our last chat a few weeks ago I gather that she often charges significantly more than I do and still has her capacity booked out. She just needed to learn to take the "risk" of asking for more and justifying it.

So I do not believe that it is a sustainable strategy to rely on cheap and good to stay that way. And those who are addicted to the low price of translation brew will inevitably end up sipping bitter dregs if they don't consider carefully what they really need from the experience of language transformation and focus on the real costs of getting it wrong.

A better fix....

Some time ago I wrote about my addiction to caffèlatte. This is still my mainstay to make it through long days, but how I make it has undergone a significant change. For the past 13 years or so I have been drinking French press coffee most of the time. Lately, however, I've been reading about the single-cup, slow drip methods that were developed by the Japanese and are now popular in the US and UK, and I tried to find a source of the equipment in Germany. No luck. However, I found something else that looked interesting: a special press for strong, well-balanced coffee without sediment. I've been getting a little tired of the dregs at the bottom of my French press, so I thought I would give the Aerobie Aeropress Coffee Maker a try. I ordered one from the German Amazon site (it's also available in the UK and US, probably elsewhere as well). Wow. This is the most interesting coffee I've had since a friend treated me to some from a cold process extractor years ago. It's simple, fast and very, very easy to clean. Beats the heck out of a French press for taste and ease of use and maintenance.

And since Christmas will be upon us once again in less than ten months, I've gone back to an old vice with this wonderful brew: egg nog latte. No commercial egg nog mix available here AFAIK, but several shots of Eierlikör (egg liquor) cut with an equal portion of milk, dosed liberally with ground nutmeg and heated blends wonderfully with the good coffee. Just the thing for a busy day of translation.

For those living in places where egg liquor is unavailable, here's a recipe from my late father-in-law, an old-time pharmacist from the days when they mixed lots of things interesting and alcoholic for the health and delight of their customers:

Herr Urban's Egg Liquor
Shake six egg yolks with 300 g sugar in a bottle (or use a blender). Add 350 ml brandy (the best quality you can afford), add vanilla sugar or tincture to taste as well as 50 ml of 90% grain alcohol. Prost!

Homogeneity: another "secret" competitive weapon with memoQ

Earlier today I received an e-mail with the following question:

At the moment we are wrestling with an analysis issue that should be solvable but we don't know how to. As I always see your posts about all kinds of TM issues, I was hoping you might be able to provide some advice.


The case is as follows:
From one of our clients we have received what is basically a list of tools in Excel for translation (NL-FR). My colleague made an initial quotation for the project based on the Trados analysis, which revealed 23% repetitions in the file. However, the client received a much lower quote from a different provider. The reason for this, according to him, is that there are a lot of high fuzzy matches in the file which the other provider has counted but Trados doesn't (for example, "... metaalzaagbeugel 12 inch zwaar model met D-greep" and "... metaalzaagbeugel 12 inch zwaar model met rechte greep".)


Do you know whether there is a way (or tool other than Trados) that does count these fuzziess when performing an analysis?

To me, this sounds an awful lot like my PM acquaintance has been blind-sided by Kilgray's homogeneity analysis, which has been a feature of memoQ for a very long time. It's a feature about which I personally have mixed feelings. Used in the wrong way by unscrupulous agencies or ignorant persons, it can be yet another club with which to clobber translators and their rates to the ground and bring about the Hobbesian state of being so many fear is in our future, if not our present. But I approach it as a valuable information tool for helping me estimate how much time a rush project might actually take. Or in the case of my correspondent's competitor, it can be used judiciously to calculate a competitive rate that might not land you in the poorhouse.

Classic Trados and most other CAT tools calculate fuzzy matches based on the content of a translation memory. If these sentences:

The cat is black and white.
The dog is black and white.
The rabbit is black and white.

do not have something similar in a TM used for analysis, they will all be counted as "No Match" segments. However, with a good tool like Atril's Déjà Vu X and it's functional "assembly" technology, similar sentences like these are handled almost like 100% matches from a TM. But DVX still won't tell you about the time you might save.

Kilgray's memoQ analyzes a text for internal redundancies and "fuzzy redundancies", the latter being referred to as having a degree of "homogeneity". But as anyone who works with CAT software knows, even high fuzzy matches can be utterly useless and cost more time than content with no statistical similarities. Translation is about meaning, not statistics, and the price assassins at Trados and other tool pimps of the past sold everyone a lousy bill of goods with nonsense marketing lies like "You'll never have to translate the same sentence again." Well, guess what? If you do successive versions of an information brochure or technical manual and don't start to update your language after a while, your text will soon sound like it was written for an age long past and might not communicate as clearly as it should. Those who can read German should have a look at the various editions of the classic cookbook Die Süddeutsche Küche by Katharina Prato, which was popular from the mid-19th century until the 1930s for truly dramatic examples of the changes in a language. (These are available online via Google Books and various libraries online. They are also a good source of offal recipes - people ate all manner of interesting things back then.) But this happens on a much shorter time scale as well: my eight-to-ten-year-old texts for the AOK social insurance brochure and various IT manuals sound rather awful and dated, though they were quite acceptable at the time they were written.

Used as a planning tool, however, the homogeneity function in memoQ can give you valuable information and help you compete more effectively in difficult times and markets.